That really was a good idea with invisible lights, didn't know there was any. I place lights on the ground floor of a 2 or even 3 level room all the time, but it looks stupid.

Edit 18 nov, 2010. Have done all things I can think of. She still can't find her apartment. The entrance hall at ground level is still dark. Demolished the nabourhood and want to start all over again. Have to pay attention this time to what I do. I also have to leave the NPC doors with a little room behind as someone has said earlier.

The lobby in the Glass Pillar is 2 or 3 stories high so I used some ceiling lights and wall lights because of its height as the light doesn't really travel far. The ceiling lights add light to the lobby but usually are invisible in game because of the distance or angle I'm at watching the Sims and the wall lights light up the lower part of the lobby were the furnishing are. My lobby looks good as having the two light sources keeps it nicely lit without being overly bright and also eliminates the deep dark shadow effect.

Though if I was playing a Simpire Apt building or scary storyline--I might want that deep dark shadow effect.

If you're building in a shell, zooming out so the shell is visible and Ctrl+Shift clicking it (with testingcheatsenabled on) will bring up two options; "reset all slotted sims" and "reset all buildable shell doors". Using these will populate the doors with NPC sims, although if you have a few doors getting them all occupied at the same time is difficult. Usually only one of the doors will contain a sim, but by repeatedly clicking "reset all buildable shell doors" you should eventually get them all populated.

This also works if you're building on a non shell building, my low-rise has two NPC tenants below my household. The way to do this is to simply find the nearest neighbouring shell building and use the above method. It works like a charm, just keep checking the doors and if the "ring bell" option becomes available you've got it.

Here's my low-rise:

wow that's great info Viceman, thanks!

that might not work I tried it.
I tried to put a hot tub for my sims in sunnydale in there house and it takes up two floors'
I wanted to put it on the balcony on the third floor. and what I had to do was extend the second floor for the bottom part of the hot tub then
I added a wall around the bottom part of the hot tub.

These are not your sims 2 hot tubs. they are better but you have to make sure you make space for the bottom part.

I hope this helps

Thank you for all the help for late night you guys are great.

P.S Has anyone made a pooltable yet
If so could anybody point me to it

Thanking you in advance

I finally managed to build a 2 story penthouse. Had both a swimmingpool and a hot tob. Had to make room for them both in the story below. The swimmingpool even had windows in it below. Nice feature

I left 1x1 room behind all the NPC doors, put in a hidden ball. I didn't touch the ground entrance, or the hall on 18th floor. Just removed a long corridor who's only purpose was to add outdoor light to the hall. Put in a wall there to make the hall smaller, and moved the entrance door to the apartment around the corner.

Then my sims found there new apartment even with no furniture.

I had an interesting experience... was playing Buccaneer Bay, and dropped in the two shorter apartment buildings from the bin in downtown lots. Didn't put any sims in em. One of my sims went to check out what had happened in one of the buildings, and found 31 (!) sims living there, listed on the callbox. For sure there aren't that many NPC doors

Wonder if I got the whole NPC household living in there... somewhere!

Bridgeport has a low-rise shell that doesn't have a player apartment in it at all. It too has a lot of sims. Maybe the low-rise shells simply house a bunch of sims. As it stands if one family lived in each lot in Bridgeport the population really wouldn't be too high, barely rivaling Sunset Valley, so maybe the short ones are "filler" apartments.

This shell does have a playable apartment in it. I'll try playing it next... maybe move in the kid from my current family when she ages up She's gonna be a private eye, I think, so an apartment building would be suitable.

@ skrikandi
where did you get that hot tub that you used as the public one on page one?

@everyone else
the highrise where the jones family lives already has a hot tub on the porch so you can take it from them

The two buyable hot tubs are in the Plumbing/Misc catalog section. THe one I used is the more expensive of those two. There's also a third one under BuyDebug.

I actually used the Plasma 501 to build my apartment. I put a pool, a hot tub, a bar, and a little "restaurant" area, equipped with a Food Merchant. (More info on all of that here: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=426224) I used the top two floors as my Sims apartment. I didn't build ANY empty or hidden rooms, and so far, there are only two other sims living in the building with my Sim. I'm hoping more fill it up, since it is quite a big building. The apartment came out amazing, as did the lobby!! I love living on the 26th floor!! When I go outside of my apartment, onto the balcony, I can LITERALLY see the whole neighborhood!! It's a great site!!

Just a slight update on my highrise with swimmingpool and hot tub http://s196.photobucket.com/albums/...cket/Tutorials/

Hey! Sorry for bumping in *blush* ... i want to ask.. does someone know a way to make more than one family live in the same building?

You can't... well, that is, you can't have more than one HOUSEHOLD on the same lot in Sims 3.

You can have more than one family, of course... they would have to be in the same household. In that case, you can use filter doors to keep them out of each other's living areas if that's what you want (there are some for download here). In a highrise, they would have to be in the same apartment, but you could probably set it up so it looks like two apartments.

Does anyone know if we can or cannot build high-rise on top of foundation? I wanted to build an underground parking garage below my penthouse but right after I placed the shell it wouldn't let me edit the first floor. I'm wondering if someone's found a way to work around it...

Thank you, Srikandi, this is very helpful!

Does anyone else have a link or a way to get the community mailbox and trash chute? The one listed earlier in custom sims link appears to either be deactivated or I do not have access to it.

That is what bothers me the most about Late Night. What the hell is the point of an apartment building if it has only one playable apartment?

In the mean time, I'll be editing just about all of the premade apartments in Bridgeport. I think I'll also turn those little houses up north into lower rise apartment buildings, like the Landgraab Brownstone and that weird looking one near the docks and the divebar.

I've been editing the Plasma 501 but I still have one problem: I can't find the skip level marker. I chose Plasma because it has two levels and I want to add a third level. I've tried everything that's been suggested... removed the floor tiles, the indoor grid, tried dragging the mouse cursor blindly all over... no luck. I can see the floor below through the unremovable grid, the light grey gravel but no skip level markers. Is there something else I can try? Any other suggestions?

Not every level in a highrise shell is buildable... the ones that aren't don't have skip level markers, but you still can't use em.

So that's why I couldn't find it. What a disappointment. Plasma had such a nice balcony and I wanted the lower floor for artifacts and nectar bottles. Okay, I guess I have to think things all over again. Thank you for the answer.


Edit: I just found High Rise Shell list and feel so stupid now. Should've done more digging. Lesson learned.

Edit: sorry I replied to a post from Nov? I just figured the discussion was still going. I'm sure you'd figured this out by now...



I've had this happen each time I've placed apartments in a game. About 5 different games. I think the service sims and generic NPCs move into random apartments, though I'm not sure if technically 'homeless' sims do as well.

No matter what kind of neighborhood you have you should see > 30 sims on the callbox because of how many standard service sims are auto-generated in a town.

Yeah, I have, but thanks

I tried doing that to get the next floor down to be part of the penthouse in two leo center and it didn't work. When you delete the flooring there is concrete under it that you can't delete so I can't get to the marker underneath. What can I do?