Spiral Stairs

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First, some numbers

• One storey is 16 clicks of the terrain tool.
• The minimum section of stairs is 4 clicks.
• A block of terrain is 4 clicks high.
• One storey or one wall is 16 clicks high.

Making a spiral staircase

It is more than one storey high and can be used to make a house, can be roofed over and Sims can use it all the way up or down. There are other ways, but this works for me.

• Level terrain
• Place one tile of decking and a flight of stairs.
• Move off the first deck tile by three points
• Raise terrain four points and place another tile of decking.
  
• Trade secret: Pull sideways from the last tile of decking (toward your first stairs) to continue decking at the same level!
  
• Now you can put a flight of stairs from the end of the second tile of decking to the first.
• Remove the end tile of decking as it is superfluous. Do this by dropping down a floor and holding down the Control key as you select the tile. (You need the moss green not the bright green highlighting to remove - may need to undo and repeat till it works.)
  
• Now rotate the view and select and level out from the uppermost tile.
  
• You are going to repeat the previous step at right angles to the last one.
  • Level some ground.
  • Raise one tile, two clicks from your last stairs, by 4 clicks.
  • Place a piece of decking.
  • Drag out the decking one tile toward your previous step.
    
• Place steps and remove the superfluous piece of decking.
  
   
• As you can see I have made the front of the stairs come forward of the rest.
• If you now count the stairs you will see that there are 12 so far. That means our next step will be at room height, so a column with a piece of flooring on top would do.
• You have now reached room height, assuming you are making a house without foundation. From here on it gets easier, but first let's tidy up the lower level. Use Control and the Level tool to level the ground. Because you have used decking you can reduce the ground level under the deck and the telescopic legs will expand.
  
• These four landings will now form the basis of our spiral staircase.
• You can remove the "legs" of the decking at any point from here on by removing the decking itself - make sure you have put floor tiles on each landing and then move down to the lowest floor. You should then be able to remove the decking holding down Control and selecting decking (remember the moss green colour for remove?)
• Before you go any further, it is worth adding stair rails at this point, 
  because once the floor tile is on this column, the game considers you have moved up a floor.

Moving on up

• Add a column to the first landing.
• Now move up a floor. Add a floor tile to the top of the column. Drop a stair flight to the previous landing.
• Continue in this way, adding columns and floor tiles and stair flights in order, rotating as you go.
• In this way you can now continue as far up as four floors.
  
• You know you have reached the top when you cannot put tiles on the top of columns any more.

Now you can build a building around your staircase.

The landings which are at the storey levels will align with floor tile spaces and can be used to make landings.

• You are welcome to download this particular staircase, ready-made, on a moderate sized lot if you would like to experiment with it.