Hello and welcome to yet another guide! This one is my first necessitorial, denoting guides that detail basic and fundamental subjects, suitable to even beginning builders! This first necessitorial will cover one of the most interesting and cool features in a builder’s toolbox, CFE. This guide is meant to be read before the guides on basic, intermediate and advanced wall curving. Since this is the most basic of the CFE and Wall Curving guides, I thought this might also be the best thread to discuss CFE. So if you have any questions or would like somewhere to show off your CFE work and get feedback on wall curving, I can try to answer
Feel free to discuss CFE, ask questions about CFE and wall curving and link some of your wall curved structures for feedback on the wall curving itself. Thanks!
To get started, what is CFE. CFE stands for Constrainfloorelevation. It is a cheat so you must start the command console using Cntl-Shft-C. After this the two cheats to know are CFE true and CFE false. It is noteworthy here that the moveobjects on cheat is also quite useful when utilizing CFE false, but that is a subject for another guide.
So to truly understand that CFE false is, we must first discuss CFE true. CFE true is the normal mode of the game with which most of you builders are familiar. In the CFE true mode, the floors on anything you build in build mode are locked. You might notice when you try to move terrain around a wall that you are not allowed. This is because the game locks in the height of the floor of that wall, both the ground and ceiling. In CFE true mode, you are ONLY allowed to work with the actual terrain, that is to say the ground level where there is grass (or something similar).
Now before we even start with CFE false, let us discuss the CFE toolbox. You can find this to the very right of the build mode box under Terrain tools. The three main tools utilized when working with CFE are the raise and lower terrain tool as well as the level terrain tool. Soften terrain is more for landscaping, the water tool is for creating lakes and such and the flatten lot tool should only ever be utilized at the very beginning before you build anything. After this, this tool should be avoided entirely.
Now let us see these tools in action. Below you can see the use of lower terrain to create a sort of trough. For this kind of landscaping, both CFE true or false could to used, however, you should be using CFE true if this is the sort of task you are doing. Note that for both lower and raise terrain, the amount of clicks you utilize can be … inaccurate. I never gamed on Sims 2, but I read that clicks were much more accurate in that game. Some builders will tell you that a single click is not accurate in Sims 3. However this is not true. What they mean is that it is difficult to tell if you clicked once or twice, etc. However, a single click will always raise or lower the terrain by the exact same amount each time. The difficulty is that you might click once with your mouse but the terrain might raise or lower by two clicks. Once you become familiar with terrain though, it is easy to tell how many times you clicked. These days I can usually tell how many clicks a curve is just by looking at it.
After that soften terrain was utilized to even it out a bit.
And now to get it back to normal, you can utilize level terrain and drag it over the entire trough. With level terrain, where you start will be the level it will throw onto the rest of the area. So here, for instance, you should start on a tile at ground level, then drag the box over the entire trough area.
So what is CFE false. Once you are building in the CFE false mode, the rules of the build game are different. You are now allowed to utilize the Terrain tools to change the height of any floor. This includes the ground floor of walls as well as the ceiling. You can even curve air (that is to say floors without actual floor tiles). Most of the time the reason you are curving a floor is to curve a wall. Curved floors are actually not the best idea since they are not utilizable by your Sims. Thus when I discuss wall curving, the two ideas (floor and wall curving) are really one and the same. Of course you can curve a floor that does not have any walls hah.
Alright so now we know a bit about what CFE actually is. Let’s go over some of the basics of what CFE can and cannot do.
The first subject, foundations! Foundations are definitely one of the nicer tools for a builder. Unlike a wall, you can mess with the terrain around a foundation. There are two key heights to a foundation or any wall.
Here we can see three different structures. To the left is normally what one might call a guide wall. In the middle you can see a foundation. To the right you can see a wall of normal height. Now let’s take a look at some of the things you can do with foundation.
First notice that when CFE is set to true, you cannot utilize the level terrain tool to change wall heights. The tool will go from green to red to show that it is not allowed.
Also noteworthy is that you can change the terrain around foundation. Here you can see I lowered the terrain in front of the foundation. However when I lower the terrain in front of the wall it cannot actually change the terrain directly under the wall.
When you delete a section of foundation when CFE is true, it will maintain the foundation height.
Now let’s see the same action with CFE false. Since floor elevation is no longer locked, deleting foundation will now force the surrounding foundation to normal wall height.
Do not worry though! There is an easy fix. Just set CFE to false and utilize the level terrain tool to level the area back to normal foundation height.
When you are starting with CFE, there are two basic wall heights with which you should familiarize yourself. You can see both of them here, the height of a foundation wall (4 clicks) and the height of a normal wall (16 clicks). These two heights are important for a few reasons. Foundation height is the smallest height a wall can be without messing with the floor above or below it. Normal wall height is the height a wall must be in order to build other walls next to it when in CFE true mode. This might sound weird now, but as you read on, it should become clearer.
Changing a wall of one height to another is a very easy task. Remember earlier when CFE was set to true and we tried to utilize the level terrain tool but it did not work. Now let us take a look at the same scenario with CFE set to false. Here you can see the level terrain tool being utilized to lower the wall structure to the same height as the foundation.
When you are utilizing the level terrain tool in such a manner, there are certain things you must know. Each tile of wall has six surrounding tiles that can be raised or lowered to curve it. Let us take a look. Here you can see a single tile of wall. To the left and right of it you can see a single tile of ceiling.
In order to see the full six though we must look at a full wall. The wall tile at which we are going to look is underscored here.
You can see the two tiles we already saw before. Now there are also two tiles to the front and back of the wall tile.
And of course there are the three tiles behind the wall. Here you can see all six being underscored. These are the six tiles you would utilize to curve that single tile of wall. Anything further will not change that wall tile.
Let us take a look at this in action. Here we are going to lower a single tile of normal height wall to the foundation height. You can see that the tiles directly above it were utilized to do so.
Now, though, because this wall tile is side by side with other wall tiles, those wall tiles will also be curved. Take a look at the tile directly to the left of the tile we just lowered. Although we lowered the tiles directly above that wall tile, those tiles were also the rightmost tiles of the six tiles for the wall tile to its left. I know that sounds a bit weird. The idea is that if you look at any two wall tiles that are side by side, they will each be in the others six ceiling tiles. This is the most basic and most fundamental idea behind the entirety of wall curving.
Take another look at the wall tile to the left that is slanted with a negative incline. The rightmost of its six tiles are of foundation height.
However, the leftmost of its six tiles remain at normal wall height. This is why the wall curved!
The next subject I am going to discuss is the order of how wall curving works. When you change the height of any floor, every floor above it will change as well. On the other hand, when you change the floor of say the second, third, fourth or fifth floors, the floors below will retain their original curve (even if that is just straight). This is why we use guide walls, to change floor heights of one story without changing the others.
Now let us see this idea in action. First we are going to try raising the height of the normal wall by two clicks. The first technique we could use is to just raise the ground under it by two clicks.
This however is not ideal. So instead let us raise the guide wall by two clicks. Notice that raising the ground under the first floor of the guide wall creates the same curve to the second floor.
Now level off the first floor of the guide wall utilizing the level terrain tool.
And finally we can now utilize this guide wall to raise the height of the normal wall by two clicks. We do this by utilizing the level terrain tool to drag from the new guide wall height all the way to the normal wall.
And there you see it. A new wall height was created without messing with the ground under the wall.
On that note, let us go back to CFE set to true for a moment. It is noteworthy to mention that after a wall has been curved, you can change the terrain under it as long as there is no wall in the way. I can show this by curving the guide wall a bit (note at this time CFE is set to false). Again note, you should never curve walls this way hah. Notice, though, that the ground underneath the curved wall is also curved.
Now delete the first floor wall.
Now you can go ahead and landscape underneath the curved wall (while CFE is set to true) without messing with the curved wall section.
Ok the last thing I am going to discuss is why the height of a foundation wall and the height of a normal wall are so crucial. I know I mentioned it before without going into much detail, but that was because it was necessary to discuss a few things before we discussed this.
First let us take a look at normal wall height. This height is important because it is the only height at which you can create new walls while CFE is set to true. We can use the foundation to see what I mean. First level the foundation to normal wall height by utilizing the level terrain tool from the normal wall to the foundation.
Although I forgot to take an image of it, you then delete two tiles of the foundation and now you can create a wall next to the foundation.
If you tried to create a wall next to any other height foundation, it would not work while CFE is set to true. You could force it in CFE false, but it will create weird curves then. The reason I am detailing this is because whenever you curve walls, you always should make certain that the inner walls maintain a normal wall height. So let us imagine you are trying to curve the outside of a structure. In fact let us take a look at one of my recent builds, Beyond Moderne. The roof and ground floor are both curved with a concave curve. But if we take a look at the inside, you can see that there is one tile of floor between the curved wall and the inner wall. This covers the awkward slanted floor area and allows the inner area to remain of a normal wall height. This height is needed to make the area utilizable by actual sims. If the floor remained curved, you would not be able to furnish correctly.
Now let us discuss foundation height walls. This height is important because it is the smallest height a wall can be before it changes the heights of the walls above and below it. What does this mean. Let us start by curving the guide wall. I am just going to randomly change the height of the ground below the guide wall. Note that this is NEVER the right technique to curve a wall hah, but for this guide it works. Notice that both the first and second story walls mimic the curve of the ground.
Now as I mentioned before, you can change the height of any wall above another without messing with the wall below. Thus we are going to even out the second story wall.
You can see that the first floor wall maintains the same curve from before, while the second story is now straight.
Now let us change the ground below the guide wall dramatically. You can see now that the height of the first floor is actually taller than the normal height of the second floor.
Now let us try flattening the second story wall again.
This time notice that flattening the second story actually changed the first story. That is because the entire height of the second story must be, at a minimum, the height of a foundation wall (4 clicks). You can see here that the height of the second story in the middle is indeed the height of a foundation wall. Although, in order for the game to do so, it had to lower the height of the first story wall.
Well, that is it for now! Be certain to read my guides on basic, intermediate and advanced wall curving (found in my note below) for details on actual wall curving. Cheers!
