Sims2 Stairwell Tutorial 1

for creating spiral stairs on a house foundation

by Tiko

Here's a screenshot of the kind of stairs we'll be creating.  This is a 'working' house in the game.

There are earlier great tutorials for building 2-flight L-shaped stairs against a house wall, without foundations.  MikeInside then worked out how to build them on a house foundation.   Building a complete 4-flight stairwell is a little more complicated, but great fun.

Start with a patch of level ground.  Add a house foundation - this one is 9 tiles wide and 10 tiles deep.  It doesn't matter if yours is deeper, but it needs to be at least 8 tiles deep.

Add a wall around the whole area of the foundation.

Now decide in advance how wide you want your stairs to be.  Maybe sketch them on paper if that helps.  Will the stairs be one tile wide, or two or three ... or more?!  Each landing except the first and last should be a square of that number.  The first and last can be wider, as they will be here.

With the wall tool make a rectangular room 3x2, centred against the front wall.  This will be the first landing.

Then, since we'll be building stairs 2 tiles wide, mark out the second landings on either side of the first, the third landings behind them, and the next floor up in the middle of them.

Notice that there's a 1-tile gap between each landing - that's to fit a stair of 4 steps.

Then, because we want our stairwell to have walls on the sides of each set of steps, fill in the gaps as shown here.

But don't join up the first landing and the top landing ... we want to have a real well in the middle of the stairs, which is why it's called a stairwell.  Your Sims need somewhere to throw their rubbish, don't they? ;)

Then make a one-tile mini-foundation as shown here.  This is our control column for adjusting the first landing, so it needs to be 1 tile away from a corner of the first landing.

You can see that it also is 1 tile away from a second landing.   But that's OK - we'll be adding a different control column to adjust the second landing.

Add two more 1-tile foundations 1 tile away from the corners of the second landing, and two more 1 tile away from the third level landings, as shown here.

A house wall is 16 steps high.  So we need four sets of steps.  We're going to add the main floor of the house after we've built the stairwell.

Use the wall tool to make column 'rooms' on each of the five mini-foundations.

Now bring in the floor -level cheat.  Hold down Ctrl+Shift and tap C.  In the white Commands window that opens at the top of your screen, type

boolProp constrainFloorElevation false

and press Enter.  If you've got the words right, the window will close.  (The capital letters don't matter - it's just easier to read with some in somewhere.)

We're now going to lower the control columns.  You can use the 'lower terrain' tool, but this involves carefully counting a lot of clicks (!).  A more precise way is to use the 4-step stair tool (1 click down = one step of a stair).

Place the stair tool on the ground so that it digs down to a tile in line with the first column, as shown.  Since we're going down 12 steps, the lower tile of this step needs to be at least 5 tiles away from the column.

Here we've marked the lower tile with a paving slab.  Then dig down one more block of steps ...

... and a third one.  We've added slabs each time.  You don't need to at this early stage, but it shows up better in the screenshots, and we'll be using slabs (or any floor tile you prefer) to lower the columns cleanly, so why not start as you mean to go on? ;)  Use the 4-clicks method if you prefer, of course, or try this!

Then run a single line of floor tiles from the base of the third set of steps till just under the column.  Here you can see the line, just before we let go of the mouse button.

Notice we haven't let go of the mouse button yet.  That means sliding the floor tiles into place rather than clicking them individually.

I'm pausing here, because a player tried this by clicking each tile in turn, and told me this happened (as in the pic).  Click each tile, and the column won't come down.  Just slide the tiles all the way underneath the foundation tile before letting go of the mouse button.   Think 'slide' not 'click'.

Check that you're underneath either by switching to PageDown (with your other hand!) or briefly sliding sideways to spread the tiles along an adjacent row.   Don't leave them there, slide back underneath the column to hold just one row.

OK.  Then let go of the mouse button.  If you've done this, when you let go of the mouse button, the column should clunk down cleanly, perfectly levelled.

You're doing great!  We've brought our control column (which has walls 16 steps high) down 12 steps so that the first landing will be 16-12=4 steps high.

Now for the other columns.  It's quite neat here to dig down for both the columns on one side, at the same time.  The third landing columns (farthest back) need to go down 4 steps only (so the third landings will be 12 steps up).  So place the stair tool and dig down in line with the column, as shown.

Place a slab or other floor tile at the foot of the step, and add another in front of it, as shown.  This simply allows us to dig down again and get in a line with the second landing columns ...

... as you can see.

Then as you did with the first column, run a single line of floor tiles from the correct stepped tile to each column in turn.  Clunk those columns down!

Repeat on the other side of the house.

As you can see, in terrain-cheat mode the floor tile is a powerful control leveller.  So now press PageUp to raise the viewpoint up one house level, and with the grid visible place a single floor tile on top of the first column (the lowest one).   We're using a blue tile here to make it easier to follow - in this screenshot I haven't let go of the mouse button yet ....

because when I do, you can see the floor tile drags down any walls that border onto its spread.  (Remember that above ground level each supported floor tile, on a wall or pillar, can support the eight tiles around it - its 'spread' or reach.)

Now add another floor tile as shown and you can see you're flattening the grid on top of the first landing, bringing the walls down from 16 steps high to just 4 - vertically challenged walls, poor things. :(

Cover the first landing with the floor tile of your choice.  This is the Maxis oak.  Notice that all the other landings have a wall dragged down, too - that's fine.

Let's go on to one of the two second landings. Place a tile on top of the control column for the second landing - again this screenshot is before I release the mouse button ....

... and after release down comes the corner of the landing.

"Why 25a", you may ask.  Well, this shows what would happen if we then simply did what we did with the first column, and built out the floor towards the house.  By doing this we start to angle the third landing control column too - and there's a problem here.  We can't restore the third column's flat top.

Have a look at the screenshot to #25 again.  You can see that next to the third column's top is another grid square.  That will be our control for the control column ... phew!

Place a floor tile on the third column, and the grid square outside it, and do the same with the second column just in case.

Now we can proceed with the second landing.  Build some floor towards the landing from the column ...

... and add your chosen floor to the second landing.  You can see it dragging down the third control column, but there's no need to worry now.

Or did we speak too soon!  We've raised part of the first landing.   It's just like wallpapering, isn't it - you press out an air bubble here, and then it reappears over there. :)

But as you can see - no real worry, because we have lots of control squares available for the first landing.

We're using a dark mahogany tile on the first landing just to illustrate.   This is before we let go of the mouse button ...

... and this is after.  Now we can place the 4-step flight of stairs, using the stair of your choice.

One down, five more to go!  Let's sort out the top of the third landing control column.  Click a tile onto the tile outside the column (the "control of the control" one).  Here we've used a black one- just to illustrate it clearly. 

This is before letting go the mouse button ...

... and after.

OK.  Now build the floor from the third column, in towards the third landing ...

... and put down the floor of your choice on the third landing.  It pulls up the floor adjacent to it, but no one's worried now!

So we flatten the second and first landings with a single click of the floor tile tool on each (using the dark mahogany just to illustrate).  Then we can lay in the flight of steps between the third and second landings.

The fourth landing is just the next floor up in the house, of course.   So we can start filling in some of this floor ...

... and start the fourth landing.

No surprise there ... it drags other floor and wall up with it.

But a few clicks with the floor tool and we're flat again.

Then we can lay in the flight of steps from the fourth landing (= second house level or storey) down to the third ...

... like so ...

... and after replacing any odd tiles on the landings with our chosen floor, we can see the stairs really taking shape.

Do the same with the other side of the stairwell, by repeating #24-43.   A lot of steps, I know ... but hey, they are stairs! ;)

After doing so, we should end up with this result.

Now it's time to clean away the control columns, etc.  We built them in 'boolProp' cheat mode, so now it's time to close that cheat.  Open the white Commands window again and type in

boolProp constrainFloorElevation true

Press Enter.  Then delete the control columns from the top down ... upper floor tiles, then walls ...

... then mini-foundations, then slabs and steps.

When adding or deleting walls and railings that are 'multi-level', the wall cursor can jump about a lot.  Be patient if you can.

Finally, level the whole terrain using the "level terrain" tool.

If this is what you end up with, you've done a fantastic job!  If not, well it's just a different kind of fantastic.

Add railings to the steps and landings, not forgetting the back of the first landing and the front of the fourth.

You may want to keep the walls that run off behind the stairwell, putting doors into the room they create.  Here we're going to strip them away a little just to decorate the stairwell on its own.

We are applying paneling to the outside walls (remember that even the flights of steps have been given their walls on either side).  The slanted paneling looks pretty cool!

Let's not forget the inside walls too - the 'well' at the centre of everything.

Then add some foundation in front of the stairwell, and add in the first flight of steps, plus railings.  Da-dá!

Press PageUp and add floor tiles to the second level or storey of the house.  Whether or not you add walls round the second storey at this stage, you can't also cover the stairwell.  Each landing is functioning as a "second storey from a parallel-dimension" and won't mix with the ordinary one.

However, when you go up to the third level of the 'house' you'll find you can floor everywhere easily.  Not all the grid squares are there when you start, but just tile what you can, and the other vacant grid squares magically appear.

And you can add a roof - hopefully a bit more interesting than this one!

Add a few doors and windows, a simple porch with pillars, and steps.  If you want windows above the porch roof, add them after the porch roof, and only make it one tile deep ... or else give the porch a strange roof or a flat one, if you prefer.

And your Sims can see the wonderful stairwell you've made, waiting for them behind the doors as they arrive.

(NB - once you've added a second level to the house, the whole staircase is only visible when you go "one level up", because each landing is actually a second-level or second-storey creation.)

You can now design different layouts, maybe running landings 2 and 3 together so landing 4 becomes 3, needing a new fourth flight of steps ... and so on.   You can even build a second stairwell from levels 2 to 3.

Well done!  Give yourself a huge pat on the back, or whatever - or hey! - a nice relaxing beverage!

Tiko