If you’re tired of stressing about coming up with creative lot designs or you find that using the same layouts over and over is getting stale, consulting a floor plan can offer a refreshing change for your builds!
350 CC Items! Time to celebrate! 🎉
Before we begin: Thank you! We’re celebrating 3 years and 350+ CC items. As a gift, supporters can get all our free CC at once here: ALL IN ONE DOWNLOAD
Although The Sims 4 has made building easier than ever before, laying out a basic blueprint for a build can be tricky for simmers who don’t have great spatial awareness. We all want to avoid a boring box build but if you’re no good at visualizing ground layouts, you may find yourself experiencing a block while in Build Mode. An easy way to get around this is to consult floor plans from other creators, or look at real-life layouts for inspiration!
Plans that will Floor You
Consulting a floor plan can make building in The Sims 4 a lot more enjoyable, and there are nearly endless options to choose from!
What Are Floor Plans?
A floor plan is used to map out the space of an empty build, showing not only individual rooms but the location of things like windows, doors, and fixtures. They are drawn in a bird’s eye view just like the Top-Down viewing option we have in Buy/Build Mode. Floor plans should not be confused with blueprints though which, while similar, are much more detailed documents and include additional information such as electrical wiring, plumbing, and framing information. A floor plan is just one aspect of a larger blueprint, but since we don’t have to worry about the little details like wiring in The Sims 4, standard floor plans will suit our needs perfectly.
Using Floor Plans to Build
Depending on where you find your plans, they may or may not include furniture layouts on top of the basic build schema. This gives you the ability to choose how much “help” you want when building, so even if you’re the most rubbish TS4 builder in the world you can still make decent builds!
A basic floor plan can be recreated in The Sims 4 with little modification. You may need to make adjustments as you go—real world floor plans don’t confine themselves to a grid so dimensions may not be 1:1 reproducible. Fortunately with draggable walls, you can go back & adjust if you find that your modifications aren’t working. A good tip to help with scaling is to choose something on the plan that can be considered 1-tile wide, like an interior door or chair, and base your plan scaling off that. So for example if a wall on your floor plan looks like it can fit 5 doors on it, you know to make that wall 5 tiles wide in-game.
If you need more in-depth help, plans that include things like furniture placement are going to be your best friend. It’s as close to automating a build as you can get without downloading someone else’s creation from the Gallery.
Hint: There are many hidden shortcuts and tools that players can use when building & furnishing lots to make them even better. Learn about better roofs, taking items off-grid, and more with our Building Guide!
Where to Find Floor Plans
You can find floor plans for The Sims 4 all over the web; just search the internet for the type of plans you need and get inspired by what you find:
- Pinterest is full of curated floor plans by simmers. Doing a search for “Sims 4 Floor Plans” yields hundreds of results, many of which have already been built in-game so there’s no resizing or mental math required!
- Tumblr is a popular place for simmers to post their creations, but they’re not the only people sharing build inspiration there. Searching for floor plans brings results from multiple sources, many of which are even rendered with furnishings, so the potential for inspiration is huge.
- Shell Challenges are a type of build challenge involving taking a predetermined exterior layout shape that you’re then challenged with filling in, finishing, and furnishing. You can do a traditional challenge or even download a blank shell as a starter that can be modified and adjusted to suit your needs. Learn more about Shell Challenges here.
- TTRPGs are tabletop games that frequently utilize their own top-down layouts and are very, very popular, with maps available all over the place. They usually follow a similar grid system to The Sims 4 so they’re not hard to transfer into the game. Check out the Free Map Library at Dice Grimorium for just some examples of floor plans you can draw inspiration from.
- Real Life Inspiration is everywhere. There is no shortage of interesting architecture in our world and if there’s a famous building you’re curious about, chances are very good its floor plan is available. One utterly ridiculous example (and quite the challenge for you to replicate) is the Winchester Mystery House!
Conclusion
As you can see, you have a lot of freedom when it comes to choosing a floor plan for your future home in The Sims 4. There are so many resources out there for ideas, and you can tweak them to fit within the limits of the game along with your own wants & skill level. There are floor plans for the likes of simple 1-bedroom homes all the way to giant estates, so there’s something out there for every builder, every skill level, and every design taste. We hope you’ve gained a new sense of inspiration for your own game, and your builds get better than ever! Have fun, and happy simming!