Basement Landscape

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Further exploration of basements

When you use a foundation, you are marking out an area of land which may not initially be level. It does not have to be. Walls need level ground. Foundation does not.

In this tutorial we are going to play around with the terrain tools and stairs, and get to know a little more about the foundation tool, and the use of the Control key to remove build-mode items.

For example, this lot looks as if it has met with a large meteorite. There is a crater taking up most of the lot. It's full of ash and there is even some water gathering in the deepest part of the crater.

Download the crater lot as it is if you would like it, or to follow the tutorial step by step.

Now, we want to set a building in the middle of the crater.

• Mark out an area of foundation. This will be the start of our house. Trial and error here to find the best area, and a liberal use of the undo key. The basement needs to be wide enough and long enough that you can actually see down into it in gameplay. And be aware that the foundation tool levels the tile next to it, so be careful not to lose the whole crater!

• Go down a floor to see what is under the foundation.

We want to lower this so that our Sims can actually go down into the underneath area. Maybe they can find some alien artefacts down there. Or maybe it would be a good place for a graveyard for unwanted visitors, or for a spooky hot tub area.

• Use the lower terrain tool to lower the land level beneath the foundation.

• It needs to be at least twelve clicks down so that they can walk about down there.

I put back the water - it evaporates during the digging process.

• Go back up a floor to the top of your foundation level and lay floor tiles on the whole thing. Add whatever house you want to build there. I added a simple rectangular box for the ground floor.
• Up a level and add flooring for the next floor.

You will see that I got an incomplete tiling for the upper floor - this seems to happen when the ground under the foundation is uneven. I worked around it by progressive layering of the tiles - see pictures. If this does not work you may have to level the basement area and start again.

• Put the walls on the first floor.

If you put an autoroof on now it looks like this:

But I think I want to do a bit more with it. Apart from anything else there is still no way in, and no way down to the cellar.

• Go back all the way down to the basement.
• Hold down the Control key and use the foundation tool to delete some of the inner part of the foundation, just as when making a cellar.

This seems to work best doing a small area at a time. Otherwise the game glitches and you don't delete anything.

If it is working right, you should see a sort of moss-green area as you delete, as shown above, rather than the brighter lime-green you see as you build.

• Now try and put a set of stairs from the ground floor, using the Connecting Stairs because they will go to any length. You will need to remove four floor tiles to let them go, and you will probably have to level the underground floor a little. (Remove the floor tiles for your stairwell by holding down the Control key and then selecting the appropriate tiles.)

It may well remove all your floor tiles from above the foundation you removed. So just replace appropriate tiles.

• Select the Connecting Stairs tool (small set of stairs) and place it on the end of the last tile before the opening, with the green arrow pointing toward the hole. When there is some level terrain for it to land on, the little one-tile square will turn from red to green and the stairs will go in. This is very much a trial and error scenario - and you will need to try out the different stairs as well to get the right effect.

Here's what I got:

Now Sims can walk down into the cellar. How much they can walk around down there depends on how uneven the terrain is; they will not go where it is too steep.

OK. Now back up to the top.

• Build walls as you like; when you reach the level you want to be the top floor it's time to arrange an entry to the house. This will be by connecting stairs to the front of the lot, so that Sims do not take too long to get to the car pool.

I've put three dormers there and a connecting stairs. So far that stair does not go all the way down - let's have a look at that.

Those stairs can be tricky to put in and you will have to rotate the view until you can see what you are doing past the crater rocks. It helps to use the Top Down view but then you need to be careful as that does not give any indication of terrain height and you might find you are building stairs too far down!

When you are building stairs on rough terrain with the Connecting Stairs tool you need much patience. The tool tries to find the easiest way down and tends to jump about. You need the green arrow to point in the direction in which you want the stairs to go.

Now the house is more or less done structurally.

• Add internal stairs between the upper floors, and to the roof-entrance, and you may want to tidy the landscaping of the crater; furnish and decorate.

Here are pictures of my final version - I made it into a Research Centre with comfortable accommodation for a scientist, plenty of working space and lots of books.

Sorry, the Research Centre is no longer available for download.

Sita