The Sims 4 recently released a big patch ahead of the release of the expansion pack High School Years, bringing a number of overhauls and new content to the long-running simulation game. The patch introduces body hair, sexual orientations that can limit or modify advances from other Sims based on gender, romantic, and WooHoo preferences, a new look to Sims’ phones, and finally, a big update to building: curved walls.
I’ve wanted round walls for a long time and I was very, very excited to get my hands on them. They bring a swathe of new possibilities for creative Sim builders (imagine making an artsy mansion with all sorts of cool curves!), but there are some pretty big caveats. In this guide, we’ll cover the basics of building with rounded walls, how windows and roofs work, issues to look out for, and some workarounds.
Where to Find Curved Walls & How to Use Them
Curved walls are found in the same place you’d normally find walls in build mode. Click Walls and Empty Rooms, and on the far right side of the selections, you’ll find three options: Rounded Room, Rounded Room (Large), and Rounded Room (X-Large). You can’t use the Wall Tool to make curved walls, and there are no round half-walls either, so your options are limited to using those three options that place already-built enclosed spaces.
Here are the three Rounded Room sizes, and what they look like when placed on a lot:
Once placed, you can modify the walls. You can move it around, rotate it, copy and paste it, and change the size of the walls to adjust length. But as you see in the image above, rounded rooms aren’t fully round — only one corner is. So if you want a room that is entirely round, you have to place four down together to combine like slices of pizza. You can also use the Sledgehammer Tool to break down these rooms into singular walls (but sometimes that causes flooring issues).
Adjusting length with the arrows is one of the most important things to remember when building. With a bit of finagling, you can create a perfect circle. This can be used to make a tower, for example, if you stack these by using the copy button.
It’s a bit of an annoying method (I really wish we had a new equivalent of the Wall Tool for rounded walls for more freedom!), and it’s squarely the fault of The Sims 4‘s limiting grid system.
Roofs, Doors, and Windows for Curved Walls
Curved walls come with limited options for roofs, doors, and windows compared to normal straight walls. Thankfully, EA and Maxis have neatly categorized your options in build mode to make these options clear from the get-go. For windows and doors, they’re in the same place they always were: Build > Windows, or Build > Doors. Under either the Windows or Doors category, you’ll find three new buttons: Supports All Curved Walls, Supports Large and X-Large Curved Walls, and Supports Regular Walls. Clicking on any of these options brings up a new menu of selections of compatible windows/doors.
The smaller your curved structure is, the less options you have. With the base game, you have only three windows that can be placed on the smallest curved walls. With High School Years and Eco Lifestyle, that number increases to nine. For larger round structures, you have around 60 (that is, if you have most of the expansions and DLC).
But here’s the thing: Not all supported windows actually curve, which makes them stick out a little weirdly. And there are random spots on curved walls where windows just won’t fit at all. Other windows just show up as…glitchy black squares, even when they are meant to be supported.
It’s far from ideal! But you can use cheats like Move Objects (this is activated by press control + Shift + C, then typing “testingcheats on” and then “bb.moveobjects.” Once activated, hold ALT when moving an item). This helps you move doors/windows/decorations more freely, but it doesn’t fix everything. Hopefully some issues will be patched later on.
As for doors, I’ve noticed fewer issues with them aside from being unable to place them on certain sections of a curved wall. It’s definitely easier than working with windows. There are a lot more door options for curved walls, too: small curved walls support over 20 small doors, and 60+ doors for bigger curved walls. As for wall decorations, the smaller they are, the more chance they’ll work on a curved wall. But most are incompatible.
By far the biggest problem, however, lies with roofs. Without any new roofs for rounded walls, it makes things…pretty difficult. We do, however, finally have a proper use for the Circular Roof that already existed prior to this patch. And it can look like this below:
But what if you don’t want to build a wizard tower or quirky planetarium? Well, you can just go without a flat roof (i.e. using no roof at all, and then just place a floor pattern on top of it.
Or you can just use a whole bunch of different roof styles and mix and match them to cover the entirety of your curved structure, but it tends to look a little messy (and can be time consuming to make it look halfway decent!):
Other Issues & Bugs to Look Out For
While I’m thrilled to have a new wall type to experiment with, the curved walls are far from perfect. Below are some other issues I came across that you should keep in mind while building:
- Combining the Wall Tool and curved walls is tricky. If you have a curved structure, sometimes straight walls from the Wall Tool don’t attach properly to a curved wall, leaving a gap.
- Sometimes straight walls auto-delete when connected to a curved wall (especially interior walls). Using the Room Tool rather than the Wall Tool is a bit of a workaround to have this happen less.
- Curved walls don’t always look right at the top, with roofs clipping into one another.
- Stacking round structures on top of one another (i.e. making a tall tower) is easy, but if they are not centered properly, it causes problems with roofing.
- Some shadows pop up where they shouldn’t with curved walls.
For more on The Sims 4, read about how pronouns were added to create-a-sim earlier this summer, and how one modder expanded LGBTQ options to make the game as queer as possible.
