I don’t know what to think or do, I’ve messed around with this for a handful of hours now and can not figure out what the issue is. I’ve got a large lot worth roughly $920,000 that I’m trying to convert into an Apartment Lot, but the game keeps telling me there’s an invalid apartment somewhere. I don’t understand how. Everything is closed off so that only those apartment doors are the ways in and out of the apartments...

It’s like, a partially-conjoined, partially elevated complex that I got inspiration from off of a set of apartments/condos/whatever they are several blocks away from me where their main floor is elevated and on a short, central hill with the apartments on the perimeter of the hill, so that you walk up the hill to access the plateau and all the doors, and that means that each apartment has a basement that’s ground level. Well, I did much the same here, with some extra stuff included above the original apartments. There’s 10 apartments total. I’ve already made sure that the pair of apartments at the highest level just below the roofing is completely okay, and the other upper level apartments are fine too. I found this all out through process of elimination by deleting specific apartment doors to see which ones the game determines are invalid. And it seems as though the four ground level ones are what the issue is coming from.

Now I don’t believe that the basement is the problem per se, because there’s a 5th apartment on that “bottom” level that the game did not seem invalid when I did the changeLotZoning thing. I didn’t do anything different with the other four on the same level, except for the fact that they’re paired and share walls. The 6th one on that same level that doesn’t have a basement (since it’s sitting above a walkway and has 2 floors above) is also fine. It’s the 4 that are paired in twos on opposite sides that share walls and foundations that have an issue.

So I did just about everything I could think of to try and get them clean and valid; I made sure there were true walls separating the apartment basements inside of the foundations since I wasn’t sure if the game counted foundation walls as separating walls, and that didn’t work. I made the basements between the apartment pairs separate and not share walls, and that didn’t work. I don’t know what the issue could be, because, apart from being fairly unique builds, everything should be perfect. No gaps in the walls, no doors where they shouldn’t be, and the only way out is through the unique separator apartment doors. Everything is closed off, but the game still says those 4 are invalid. If I delete the doors to those four, then the other 6 are deemed valid, including the one that doesn’t have a basement but is connected to on both sides to the “invalid” apartments, and including the one that has a basement but is not connected to any other apartment whatsoever. I don’t know what to think; I feel like I did everything to the book and error-free. I’d hate to have to scrap this because this is supposed to be representative of a closed-off community and probably the most up-scale apartment I plan on having, and I’d hate to have to scrap this when there’s just, nothing wrong with it on the surface. Nothing wrong with it anywhere, from what I can tell - everything’s closed off!

I've got pictures here for reference that I just took.

EDIT: My goodness, I didn't know the game takes screenshots that were that small and tiny...but yeah, the issue's with the twos on each side. I had made each apartment have different wallpaper to ensure I didn't get things mixed up. And nothing's mixed up. Everything's closed off, everything's where it should be. But still, invalid.

Definitely going to need larger images, and from a top down view would be better.

Okay, so I tried to get bigger images using the Print Screen button, but my laptop kept copying the desktop instead of the actual game, so I had to take those small snapshots that the in-game function creates and resize them large. That's the best I could do, but in the last image, I marked the entrances to the 6 apartments that have entrances on the base level, all of them except the one furthest away from the street containing basement levels. The two marked green are fine, and the other 4 apartments that are on the higher floors are fine. The four with the red X's are the supposed "invalid" apartments that prevent the game from converting the lot. Again, I don't know why only the one nearest the street works fine with the basement level because the only difference between that one and the other four are that the two on the west and two on the east sides share walls respectively. And I actually had them share more basement walls but you can see where I carved out dead space there in the basement levels between the adjacent apartments because I figured maybe the game was confused and I thought maybe if I separated them a little, it would be okay. But that ultimately failed too. I don't know what the issue could possibly be...

I'm pretty sure you can't make more than 8 apartments on the same lot. Could that be it?

If printscreen is taking pictures of the desktop, try right-clicking the executable and under Compatibility disable desktop composition. Resizing blurry images doesn't make them less blurry, it only makes them worse.

I had that happen once when I placed too many apartment entry doors on one apartment once by mistake and I also play my game in windowed mode so I can get a print screen and I usually only have about four apartments renable and four more for display that tenants can borrow if they just arrived in town and have no furniture until they start buying it over time.I'd start with making some of the units become just model units and those can be fully furnished and leave six of them as rental units.I made a mistake like yours when I first got Apartment Life and was on my older computer more than ten years ago.

I don't think there's a limit on apartment units per lot--I've made a lot with 11 units before, for example. It's just that playables can only ever occupy 4 units at a time.

@Shady McCoy, did you place the stairs with move objects on? If so, delete them and place them again without cheats. This was something that stumped me for a while on that 11 unit lot--it was I lot I made for the Apartment Mania contest. Redoing the stairs was the only way to get it to zone properly. It's hard to say without seeing your lot, but another thing is to be sure your stairs aren't creating a separate room. IIRC, split stairs, where you use the stage, aren't so good for apartments as the game often has trouble recognizing that it's a stairs and not a separate unit. Also be careful of fencing--room divider fencing often leads to the game not recognizing what's in the apartment--and make sure any back doors or second entries into a yard or patio are completely enclosed so that the apartment door is the only door into a unit.

Finally, for your print screen issue, that happens to me when I play in Windowed mode. Try playing in Fullscreen mode or get a free screen capture program that lets you select the area to take pictures of.

Thanks all for the replies; I'll definitely have to try that desktop compatibility thingie sometime, If I know where that compatibility section is-

Anyways, I did some experimenting, and I found out what was, apparently, "wrong." I say "wrong" in quotes because it makes absolutely no sense. No, I didn't have any borders anywhere except for walls, foundation walls, roofs, and the fences, all of which were fine the way I had them. I didn't have any split levels anywhere either, minus the central, hilled communal area. that the foundation's built around. And I haven't messed with the moveobjects thing for anything other than getting rid of stuck chairs, trash cans, toilets, etc. that can't be used anymore.

What I noticed was that I had placed those connecting stairs there to connect those four apartments to their basements instead of standard stairs. Actually, the fifth, central one also has connecting stairs to the basement, but the game said that one was fine; I guess since the other four were adjacent to one another, the game told me to F- off. But I thought that maybe it could be an issue because I remembered that at some angles, you could see the structure of connecting stairs extend far below where the last step is placed, so maybe the game thinks that that means they're technically out of bounds for whatever reason - which, again, makes no sense because by that logic, the fifth apartment should've been invalid too. I don't know why this game wants to be so finicky.

So I replaced those 4 pairs of connecting stairs with staircases, and low and behold, the game accepted those as valid and converted all ten apartments and the lot into an apartment lot. Which is BS. I can't believe it had an issue with the types of stairs I used, of all things. And this is like, the 10th apartment lot I've done or whatever it is, and this is the only time I've had the game tell me that I'm invalid in my apartment arguments.

I'm gonna revert the walls in the basements back to the shared walls they originally were and see if it works that way with the standard staircases. But that's just some total BS. The only reason I wanted to use the connecting stairs is because the game only lets 1 sim up and down the standard staircases at a time, and there's like, 3 potential bedrooms and a general living room in those basements, so I initially built with the connecting stairs so that sims don't get stuck and then auto-cancel out of their actions from them deciding 1 lone person past halfway down the stairs was in their way. But if I have to use those stupid staircases down there, then fine, I guess.