When you start playing Sims 4, you create a family then get to buy or create your own house. There are tons of ways you can do things from clicking and dragging on all of the options. From size of the room to roof pitch to window height. But there are a bunch of shortcuts in build mode, that you aren’t mentioned explicitly while you are building. They are hinted at in the loading screens and you can find them deep in the tutorials, if you wanted to read them. But it’s easy to miss. So what are these shortcuts?
Keyboard Shortcuts
- To move objects up or down if they don’t fit perfectly on shelves or other items, you can press the number 9 to move things up. And number 0 to move them down. This can also be used if you want to make a magical build with floating objects.
- Holding down the Alt key allows you to move objects off of the grid to wherever you want as long as they don’t overlap other objects. Unless you enable bb.moveobject cheat to allow for this. More on that later.
- To enlarge or shrink objects you can use the buttons [ and ] respectfully.
- If you have a number pad then select an object, as long as you don’t set the object down you can use the – and + keys to cycle through the swatches. After you place an object, you can no longer use this shortcut on that object.
- Have a roof where you want the sides to be different lengths, if you hold the shift key while moving the overhang then you can adjust just the one side rather than both. This can help make things look more realistic and overall just better.
- Created a house with an awkward layout or want to create diagonal tiles/flooring in a section of the house, there is a shortcut to allow for this. Hold down ctrl and F keys, then you will get triangle shaped floor tiles to use. Press it one more time and you’ll return to the normal square space.
Build/Buy Cheats
As I mentioned earlier, there is a cheat in Sims 4 that will allow you to overlap objects or place them wherever you wish. Note, some items can become un-usable by your sims when doing this. Like items under the sink might make the sink not work anymore. To enable this:
- Press Ctrl, Shift, and C at the same time to open up the command console in The Sims 4.
- Type in testingcheatsenabled true
- Press Enter
- Type in bb.moveobjects on
- Press Enter
Have any other building tips in Sims 4? Let us know in the comments.