Tutorial for Split Level

[Dellena]

Once you learn the basics, doing a split level is fairly simple and here's how.

I'm going to keep it very simple for this tutorial but you'll learn all the tools you'll need.

Start with the ground floor of your house.



Add the foundation.  I would recommend not going too high because you'll probably want the steps going down to the room to use no more than one square.



Create the room that will be sunken.



Click on the Sledgehammer tool at the top and if you hover over the floor of the sunken room it looks like this.



Click the Sledgehammer tool on the floor to remove it.  Currently, you cannot remove individual floor tiles of a room.



Now you need to decide the style of the wall between the sunken room and the rest of that floor of the house.  If you used a very low foundation, you might not want anything separating the two rooms.  In that case, you just delete the wall between the sunken room and the non-sunken room.  The game will still see these two rooms as separate even though you've removed the wall between.  On the other hand, if you use a foundation a bit higher, then you might want some fencing (wouldn't want our sims falling off the ledge and hurting themselves, now would we?).  You can add fencing two ways.  Find the fence you want and draw it out like you're used to in Sims 3.  Or you can use the Replace Fence option.  If you use the Replace Fence option, you don't even need to delete that wall.  Simply click on the non-sunken room so the room is selected, pick your fence and hover over the wall that will be changed.  It should show it with the fence in place.  Click and you're done.



At this point I wouldn't do anything else to your sunken room until you're sure of the placement of your whole house.  If you move a house it removes any stairs and floor tiles you place on the ground of a sunken room don't move.  So make sure you're happy with where your house it sitting before proceeding.

Now we need stairs down to the sunken level.  One of the things I love about Sims 4 is that stairs just cut out the fence now.  So pick the stairs you want to use and place them.  You can have the stairs make a one square landing, or push them in so they're flush with the ledge wall.



Pick your flooring for the sunken room and you'll need to click and drag or click on individual squares to apply it.  The game sees this as the ground, so you can't auto fill the sunken floor.



The default foundation has the stick out detail which also shows on the inside.

I would recommend changing the foundation to one of the flat foundations so the room walls are smooth in your sunken room.  Or you could look at it like a chair rail I guess.



That's really all there is to it.  Since lighting passes through floors in Sims 4, your sunken room will be lit from windows and lights on the floor above.

[simsonata]

Again, thank you. Are you doing a series of building tutorials?

[Dellena]

Just addressing a couple things I've seen so far that people have asked about.  We'll see if there's more that people want to know.

[Devin]

I figured this one out on my own, but it's nicely simple, which I love. Less digging than there was in the Sims 3, and I don't miss the terrain tools, personally.

Thanks!

[TobeyR]

Wow that is awesome, I didn't even think of doing split levels in the house lol

[lindsaysoderberg]

That is very cool! If I make a split level story, can I only place one story on top, or can I also have a third story?

Thanks for the ideas!!

[Brian_Z]

Oh, so THAT'S how some of the builds I've seen did it.  But those two rooms will still have a ceiling the same height though, won't they?

Came in here to ask how I could re-create my grandmother's house from when I was a kid, and this was the closest match to what I wanted to do.  Grandma lived in a house where the whole floor plan was split level.  Facing the front of the house from the street, on the right was the garage and a room behind it at ground level, and the bedrooms were on top of that.  On the left was a basement, but only about half a story down; on top of that was the living room, dining room, and kitchen; and on top of that was an attic bedroom.
So: from the garage, you went 1/2 story down to the basement, or 1/2 story up to the shared spaces.  1/2 story up from the shared spaces was the bedrooms, above the garage.  1/2 story up from the bedrooms, was the attic bedroom.
Can this be done in Sims 4?  I've managed to make two separate stacks of stories, with one stack raised half the height of a story, but it won't allow me to put them directly against each other.