Living in a Community building NOT! Help requested.

[Joria]

I had this great idea.  Since there are several buildings in the game with extra floors of wide open rooms up above, I figured it would be way cool to make an apartment for the building "manager"/ owner to live in.  Well, guess what?  You can build it, but no one can live there and call it home.  I tried several different ways of making the building one you can call "home" but you can't.  Oh, you can physically move the owner into the apartment any time it's time for him/her to cook, sleep, pee, bathe, but you can't send them "home" in anyway.  They are basically homeless.  As long as the lot shows up as being a community lot, it can't be a home.

Ok, then.  So we build the apartment, go to edit town, rename the building as a house and not a community lot.  Great!  Now they can go home.  Only now the building is no longer whatever it was before and none of the townies will use it unless they are personally invited in!  Now it doesn't function as whatever it was before, be it laundromat, hangout, or whatever it was.  I tried several different ways of getting around this but I couldn't find a way out.  If any of you computer/game wizards know of a way to make this work, I sure would love to hear about it!

[TGBlank]

Cannot be made to make work. The closest thing you can do is what you already did: staying/sleeping/eating/bathing/etc there while owning a home lot (could even be a 10x10 empty lot) somewhere else.. from where you still need to collect your mail.

[Sophie4563]

Joria, I do the same thing with my sims in Twinbrook. I have an artist who has an art studio/loft above the consignment store. In the same family is an Astronaut who spends most of his week at a fishing cabin. It would be great if EA let us set as community building as a sims home so they can do laundry, cook meals and head there after work. But for now I make do with having my sim live in the building as much as possible.

[TommyT]

TG's right, you can't force Sims to live on a community lot.  They'll generally stay as long as they can fulfill their needs and they don't have a priority script pop up (work, giving birth, etc.).

[Joria]

Sigh.  I just wish they would fix it so we could do that.  It is so awesome to be able to build a really posh apartment in those huge spaces and have your "job" be down on the first floor. 

So my latest endeavor was for my kid.  She built a really awesome family and wanted to play in BP, which I avoid like the plague.  She was ok with cheats so we motherloded, (I couldn't remember the family funds cheat), and I made them extremely rich.  Moved the tenants out of the high rise they were in and built a really fine apartment with three bedrooms and 3 and half baths.  It was quite fun and a challenge for me because 1. I really don't know how to design for males and 2.  I know even less about designing for goth and emo teens!  Mom and dad were no problem although lavender and seafoam are not my favorite color combos.  My bright idea was putting a hot tub on top of the building.  You got it.  You can't do it~~!  Ok, yes you can with a cheat, BUT you can't make an elevator go there so they can use it, and you can't put it on the floor they live on even with the cheats because the building manager won't allow it.  Hmmm, I didn't think about stairs though.  That could be an option.  While I really hate BP, I do love remodeling the high rises.

[TGBlank]

Joria:

Testingcheatsenabled true
rbbb false

That will disable the nagging manager, and then you can build wherever you please on the building.
Might want to throw in moveobjects for the tub and/or buydebug.

[Joria]

Joria:

Testingcheatsenabled true
rbbb false

That will disable the nagging manager, and then you can build wherever you please on the building.
Might want to throw in moveobjects for the tub and/or buydebug.

I used all the above.  You CAN put things up on the roof.  You can even put an elevator system between however many stories there are as long as there isn't a half floor in between.  (frieze?)  The problem is, even though the elevators are there and positioned exactly right, when you step into the elevator on your living floor there is never a cue for go up any higher.  You can only go down to the ground floor or whoo hoo in the elevator~~.  Even with rbbb false it would not let me put in a hot tub on the floor they live on.  Perhaps the game assumes there are npc's living underneath who might not like that stuff in their home?

[Beddy_Boop]

I wonder for a consignment store, if you kept the cash register, if the "manager person" would still come and tend to it if it was not on a community lot?
I'll test it out and edit this post...
EDIT: I couldn't find the cash register in the Debug: miscellaneous section... so yeah, that wouldn't really work out.

[TGBlank]

That's strange about the elevator, is it directly above the ones that go to the lower floors? (ie, above the yellow arrows), did you deleted the "level skip marker"/"hidden room" from that floor? (you may need buydebug to see them).
As for tubs, there are some floors that complain (the floor right above the lobby), but I don't think you get the building manager something something for that, and you can always moveobjects on and put it anyways.

[Joria]

That's strange about the elevator, is it directly above the ones that go to the lower floors? (ie, above the yellow arrows), did you deleted the "level skip marker"/"hidden room" from that floor? (you may need buydebug to see them).
As for tubs, there are some floors that complain (the floor right above the lobby), but I don't think you get the building manager something something for that, and you can always moveobjects on and put it anyways.

Yes, it was.  So maybe what I needed to do was make a separate elevator that only went up and never went to the lower floors.  I'll try that.  I think I got the level skip marker but not positive.  I was running cheats so probably used buydebug but don't really remember.  Moveobjects on did not allow me to put a hot tub anywhere on the living floor.  I could place one on the two floors above, (although the bottom part of the tub would have been down into the living space), but not on the actual apartments floor.  I'll try it again when I'm not involved with my newest project, building a mini-mansion on a 10x10 space with two Sims actually living in it and paying for the whole thing.  It's quite a challenge as I'm not allowing most cheats.  (moveobjects and other building things are allowed for my sanity's sake)

[TGBlank]

One thing I noticed is that all elevators I've seen are *inside* a public room, even those that are enclosed in 2x2 squares have public room markers inside them.