Harness Roof Cheats to Top Off Your Amazing Builds!

So you’ve spent hours, days even, building a lot that you’ve meticulously planned out and the last thing you need to do is place a roof. You pick a shape, lay it down…and it looks just terrible. What a letdown! Did you know that there are hidden controls and roof cheats you can use to make your builds look amazing? Luckily, we do!

Though there are tutorials and lessons built into the Sims 4 for things like basic building modes, they’re very vague and omit some of the more interesting tricks you can use with the help of cheats. Take a look in your Library at some of the Maxis builds and you can see examples of these roofs, such as the curved roofs on the “Halfsies” Lounge lot:

Changing the silhouette of your roofline can completely morph the vibes of a build and really tie the theming and architectural style together, and with a building’s exterior being your first impression of it you want to make sure your lots are conveying the right feeling of what they’re all about. Using the roof cheat is an easy, mod-free way to achieve this. The best part is that this cheat will be one of easiest cheats you’ll ever use in a game!

The (Incredibly Simple) Roof Cheat

This roof cheat is so simple that it should barely count as a cheat, but since it’s not part of most player’s common knowledge I think it qualifies. Once you’ve placed a roof, make sure it’s still selected and then hit the following on your keyboard:

SHIFT + C

You’ll know that the cheat has registered because you’ll see additional anchor points pop up on your roof. From here, you can grab & adjust the roof from multiple points which will affect the height, curve, and angle of your roof pieces to achieve some really interesting results!

Reshaping Roofs Completely

In the example gallery above, the roofing in the center of every picture is the standard shape found in Build/Buy mode. The funky pieces on either side are that exact same roof piece with the difference being that the roof cheat was used before adjusting them. Look at the variety of roof shapes you can achieve!

Smoothing Roof Silhouettes & Patterns

Another bonus from the roof cheat is that it smoothes out the roof shape and texture, so even if you get a roof adjusted to your liking without the cheat, activating it will upgrade the appearance. In the above example you can see that prior to smoothing, this roof looked like the top was pinched together and the textures in the middle were squished. After hitting Shift+C and smoothing the roof, the lines flow into each other much more nicely and the pattern looks far more evenly distributed across the roof. The tweaks are slight but they make all the difference!

Other Roofing Tricks

A few other tips & tricks that can give you more control over your roofing:

• Holding ALT when adjusting the roof height will allow much finer adjustments, which is incredibly useful when your roof is made of multiple parts. This trick will give you the ability to get all roofing to the exact same height regardless of its size and shape.
• Holding SHIFT when adjusting the edges of a Gabled, Half-Gabled, or Half-Hipped roof allows you to adjust the edges independent of each other. If you only want an overhang on one side of your build, this is how to do it. Longer roof edges will give more adjustment options with the roof cheat like the “wave” options seen in the example gallery photos above.
• If you don’t care for the tweaks you’ve made to a roof piece, hitting SHIFT+C again will snap the roof back to its original pre-adjusted shape.
• The roof cheat only kicks on for the roof piece you have selected, so you can combine cheat-modified roofs with non cheat-modified roofs for an even larger variety of roof shapes!
• Search the Gallery for #roofing and you’ll find a variety of incredibly creative builds with all sorts of cool roofs. You can use them for inspiration or download them directly if you prefer. Sorting by “most popular” will get you the best results.

In Conclusion

If you like building in the Sims 4 but don’t care for how limited the roofing choices are, using the roof cheat will be your new favorite thing. This cheat will give you a much larger range of adjustments for your builds if that’s what you’re looking for, or merely smooth and even out the more basic silhouettes if you prefer to keep it simple, but clean. No mods or memorization of cheat codes required! The cheat itself may be simple, but it unlocks a complex variety of ways you can refine your roofing. Now go build some cool stuff, and happy simming!

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