Started building a house but the lot was too small, so saved it to the library and removed it from that lot. Restarted that world, went to Edit Town and selected a larger lot, imported the house, placed it on that lot, centered it, okayed that and returned to build mode ....where the house is in a pit. Could find no way to raise the structure to ground level so accepted the challenge of finishing it as it sat and landscaping around it. But why did the house appear in a pit? (it was on level ground went built and exported) and is there a way to correct that?

Fwiw ......

You have to use a cheat to align the lot with street level when placing it via Edit Town.

First, bulldoze the house. Before placing it again press Ctrl+Shift+C, type "testingcheatsenabled true", hit Enter. Then, press Ctrl+Shift+C again and type "setimportedterrainoffset <value>". The value must be a number, and it can be positive/negative, or decimal like 1.5 (In your case it needs to be positive). If you don't get it right on the first try, you can keep retyping the cheat with different numbers until you get it right. Next, use "constrainfloorelevation off" to flatten and even out the lot if some parts get raised or sunken.

Once you are done placing this lot and want to place a normal one that isn't raised/sunken, set "setimportedterrainoffset" back to 0 so the height offset doesn't apply to your next lot.

EDIT: You could also use "constrainfloorelevation off" entirely but you have to redo the leveling of the floors and some objects can get raised above ground so you have to delete them and press CTRL+Z to return them, this time in their normal position

Thank you! I suspected some arcane command buried in the system.

I don't like this house (the top rooms have a wonderful view ....and a trek down four flights of spiral stairs to the bathrooms), though a friend deems it cool; it was designed as a feasibility study for a larger structure where each bedroom will be a small suite.

Actually it's not bad design and Iike it. It has potenial as futuristic/brutalism style home and you can make each bedroom suite little more bigger and change or include more furniture/decoration that fit better in this style from other EPs if possible (High-End loft stuff, Diesel or from Into The Future). Just be careful with the spiral staircase placement, because they are prone to create routing failures if they are not placed properly.

"Just be careful with the spiral staircase placement..."

A major issue since there are no double wide spiral stairs; if residents want to go to bed, or to the bathroom, at the same time, tempers will flare. (For some weird reason the stairs do not appear in screenshots.)

Spent an hour playing around with the terrain elevation; no idea what are its limits, doesn't seem linear, and is occasionally unpredictable. But it worked -

FWIW, I did use a pair of spiral staircases, on opposite corners of the central column, on an early "pedestal" house to access the pool/yard area; street access is via the lofty staircase on the left -

Unfortunately spiral staircases are really a pain to be correctly configured. Even with the right placement they are awful to play with.

They don't appear from distance maybe because "Hide Objects" is toggled on - that acts like performance booster.

About the terrain... that's the charm of Sims 3 Glad you had the patience to make it

Very interesting design (it breaks the physical laws in real life but it doesn't matter here )

I don't know but from Isla Paradiso fixing guide I read that pool must not be build underneath other routable areas like bridges like yours that enters inside.

"...it breaks the physical laws in real life but it doesn't matter here "

How true. In RL it would take quite a bit of engineering micromanagement of all systems just to balance the stress, not to mention the slightest breeze would snap it off at ground level. But physics in our sim world are quite forgiving.... if you can imagine it, it will work. (My most ridiculous house was a four story inverted tetrahedron atop a 2x2 glass room containing a spiral staircase; it worked of course, but looked so awkward I added support columns from the center of each side to the ground, unnecessary but aesthetically pleasing.)

I've not noticed if sims will swim under that bridge, I was more concerned with whether they would walk over it (they do); I spent at least an hour, inventorying my vast stock of unacceptable language, deciphering how to make it (first bridge for me). That bridge is the only access to the yard, fences and hedges surround the yard, the only gate opens to the main staircase.


Spiral staircases are very easy for me, just place them where wanted and rotate to properly orient the entrance/exit, and they automatically align when stacked. It's the standard staircases that give me fits - "the ceiling is too low" (?!), "cannot intersect objects" (what objects, there's nothing but a foundation and a wall here), or that wonderful situation where you can place a staircase in the middle of a room but not along a wall.

When the game says "the ceiling is too low" is probably because one of the levels you are trying to connect with stairs is with uneven floors or it's not exactly one wall tall or 16 steps regular stairs high. You have to use "constrainfloorelevation off" cheat to make sure every floor is flat and in the right hight.

For the "cannot intersect object" check if ceiling or wall lamp gets in the staircase footprint. If there no such thing the game probably some invible barrier or objects without your knowledge. In edit town save the lot in the library, bulldoze the current house and then place it back again. Then check if the issue persists.

Edit: When you were building the house probably "constrainfloorelevation off" was activated by mistake and if you're building something on uneven terrain it will probably affect the upper floors too.

The first thing I do when building, even on a default lot, is to level the lot. I use cheats as little as possible, they seem to amplify issues if you want to move the house to another lot or, heaven forbid, another town (one, moved from Sunlit Tides to Twinbrook, looked like it had been through a tornado then reassembled in the dark by drunken carpenters).

One thing I've noticed when the game will not let me build something is if I remove items from the vicinity where I'm working I can eventually build what I want then usually replace those items with no further complaints from the game (some houses I've built and removed as many items as actually appeared in the finished house).

Building in Sims3 is often like dealing with a city bureaucracy - you will usually get what you want but it's never a straightforward process. But I love games where I can build things - Simcity, Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, OpenTTD; in Sims 3 I probably spend as much time building houses as actually playing the game (and have two worlds under construction, one a recreation, within the confines of Sims3, of the small town where I grew up (about 750 people); the other based on a mod I did for Morrowind a million years ago, a large atoll with the central lagoon above sea level so there's a large waterfall at the open side, and a mountainous region on the other side).