Here I will show you, how to make a floating building high above the ground.

For a floating building you will need the cheat "constrainfloorelevation false/true" (without "") and the cheat "testingcheatsenabled true" or a teleporting-device like the Llama or, for everyone without Supernatural, the buyable teleporter by VoiceIHear or a similar device (the problem with the buyable teleporter is the fact that every lot, using the buyable teleporter, is broken after exporting into a sims3pack-file).

I also recommend you to switch off the auto-complete-roof. Roofs may cause some problems.


So let us begin:

1. Make a floor on the ground where you want to build the house

2. Build a wall around the floor and then build a floor in the first floor, as seen in the picture below.

3. Delete the walls on the ground floor and delete a 3x3 edge of the floor on the ground-floor.

Now the building should be similar to the building, as seen in the picture below



Now comes the important part and you should be very careful. One mistake and you must start from the beginning.


4. Press ctrl+shift+c to open the cheatconsole and type in "constrainfloorelevation false" (without "") and then raise the terrain on the deleted edge with the raising-tool of the build mode and the middle square pencil up to the maximum terrain-height.



5. Now go to the first floor and use the straightening-tool to straight the whole first floor, starting from the raised part to raise it to the same level



6. Use the cheat "constrainfloorelevation true" (without "") and go back to the ground-floor to straight the raised terrain back to the original level with the straightening-tool.


7. Repeat steps 4 to 6 until you are happy with the floating-height of the building. If there is a bug with the first floor while you are making the steps, just delete one piece of the first floor and press the Return-Button in the game to fix the bug. Don't forget to set "constrainfloorelevation" back to "true", when you have finished raising the building. Now your building is floating in the sky.



8. Now you can build the final house and the interior of the house. You can build up to 3 levels on this raised first floor. Now you can also delete the floor on the ground. When you want to use the cheat “testingcheatsenabled true” to teleport in the house (activate the cheat in the cheatconsole, hold ctrl+shift and left-klick on the location, where you want to teleport and choose “teleport here”), then now your building is ready for your sims.



9. When you doesn't want to cheat to get in the house, you must place two teleporting-devices of the same type (for examples, see on the top of the thread), one inside the building and one on the ground-floor to be able to access and leave the building without cheats. In the Pictures I used Llamas of “The Sims 3 Supernatural” as teleporting devices.



10. Now your floating house is ready for your Sims.




Glitches with floating buildings:

-Since patch 1.5, I think, there is a strange glitch, when you take steps 3 to 5 more then three times. -It's also impossible to build walls under the floating house but fences, terrain and objects should work, when you have set the “constrainfloorelevation” cheat back to “true”.
-In this concept with teleporters or Llamas to access the building, the AI isn't be able to access the house, because AI-Sims can't use the Llama or the teleporter. I am trying to include elevators in the next floating buildings, which should be useable by the AI. When it works, I will make an additional tutorial to show you how to use elevators on floating buildings.

I hope, this tutorial was useful. When you have some questions, ask me.

I can't get the "constrainfloorelevaton" cheat to work, so when I try to raise the terrain, the ground just goes through the second floor.


~EDIT~
Oh, dear. It suddenly started working. It just took a moment and I'm impatient. Great tutorial, thank you!

Great Tutorial! Thanks!

That's really neat, thanks for the tutorial!

Have you tried something like this? CyberBob's Beam Me Up teleporter, http://www.den.simlogical.com/denfo...hp?topic=1011.0 - Sims will use it automatically. I think it goes up to 9 stories.

If you make the original float on floor 2 instead of the first, you can also build one floor rooms to the ground level if you wish to do so. Of course this reduces the amount of floors on the sky-house by one as well.

Regarding making version with elevators when you get it working, you can just edit this thread and add the tut in, is technically still same tut, so no need for two threads

And finally, about post formatting. Closing images in to spoilers/infobuttons either one/few or all in one helps to keep the thread readable. Here is a link to a post formatting tutorial you might find useful, if you didn't know these things before. http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=487310

You can keep editing this tutorial and making it better, but the basic tut seems good enough to be helpful, so I'm moving it to Build tutorials!

thank you very much for this great tutorial!

Thank you for the tip. I will try this.

@armiel: Thank you for moving the thread in the tutorials-section and thank you for the formatting-tips. They are useful.

@all: I figured out, how elevators to floating buildings can be build and in this post I will show you how it works. With elevators the AI is also able to enter your floating building.


1. After you have raised up the first floor to the floating-height you like, you need to build a basement on the groundfloor, which includes the first elevator, because you can't build walls beyond the floating building, when you have raised up the first floor.




2. Then you need to build an additional entrance-part to the basement, because you can't build stairs on the basement beyond the floating building.




3. Build an elevator with walls and stairs on the basement.




4. This part is a little bit tricky: Now you need to place an elevatorshaft on the groundfloor on the exact elevator-position, which is marked with a yellow grid.




5. Now build the final elevator with walls on the floating first floor at the position of the yellow grid.




Now your elevator should be ready to be used also by the AI. Maybe it would look better, when you cover the elevatorshaft on the groundfloor, for example, with a rabbithole of the community-objects section by using the "moveobjects on" cheat or with an object of the debug-section, which can be activated by first using the "testingcheatsenabled true" cheat and then the "buydebug on" cheat.

If you have some questions, just ask me.

I am stuck at step 7, which is a repeat of step 1-6. Problem is, after getting the ground to max height, which raises the platform ... and then level the ground, I don't know what to do from there.

Essentially, step 1 to 6 raises the first floor's height to max terrain height. But what do I do from there to "repeat"? If I build new wall, it will be tall and touching the floating platform. But if I raises the terrain, with CFE on, it does not push the entire structure taller, it will just shrink the height of the wall (which means the floating platform will not go any higher).

I think I missed something. Because I do want my platform to go as high as ... well, the max height of terrain.