How To: Functional Exposed Basements (with proper stairs)

[Claeric]

Y'know, basements. On a house with a foundation.

Normally it requires you cut a big hole in your foundation so the stairs can go to a "landing" and ground level, then down to the basement. OR you cut out the middlew of the foundation and build a basement sims-2 style, without the benefits of the properly dropping walls and easy visibility.

Well, not anymore. Tada. Now you can build a house with a foundation, and a basement, and working windows on the basement, and proper stairs without a stupid landing.

http://fuzzylogicdishwasher.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-to-functional-exposed-basement.html

It really isn't that hard. What you are doing is placing floating floor tiles over a basement poking out of the ground.

The video starts at step 6, the first 5 are very simple. Just build a basement on raised land until you get one that is exposed enough for whatever window you are using. I have a bit of an issue with outside stairs, as you will see, this is because my foundation is a bit awkward and so the stairs couldn't reach the ground properly.

Apologies, but there's no text or anything on the video to mark out the steps. I will redo it. There's a bit of filler crap in the middle where I fiddle with front door stairs, too, ignore that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jexQ_ZivzlA

What you will be doing: Building a basement on raised land, flattening the land around it so that it looks like a foundation, and adding floor tiles so that you can build a house on top.

1. Raise the land a few clicks.
2. Put a basement to test the height.
3. Using Constrainfloorelevation False, flatten the land.
4. Go to the basement and, using moveobjects on, place privacy windows
5. Check. Are they visible from the outside? You're good. No? Try again. delete the basement, raise the land some more.
6. Once it's good, build your basement and flatten the land again.
7. Put a foundation next to the exposed wall of your basement.
8. Is the foundation height the same as the exposed wall? If so, you're good. If it's too low, build it on a tiny raised piece of land to get it to match.
9. Once the foundation is at the right height, matched perfectly with the basement wall, build it around the perimeter of the basement.
10. Use the tiles around the edge of the foundation to place floor OVER your basement
11. There will be gaps in the center that can't be tiled. Place a foundation piece in those, and add more floor. Delete the foundation, and add floor where it was(since there's floor around where it was, you can now place floor there)
12. Repeat until the entire thing has floor.
13. Build walls on the floor
14. Remove floor for stairs
15. Place stairs

Edit: You can NOT make one at the exact height as a foundation. This sucks, but it's unavoidable. If it is foundation height, the stairs refuse to go through to the basement, and instead will just stop at the ground. If it's more than foundation height, they are FORCED to be longer than "one tile", and will go straight through to the basement. :\ If anybody finds a workaround for that, it'd be great.

[Mirelly]

I was making basements, after WA escaped, but before getting WA. I had the latest patch in place which put the basement tool in the F3 menu, BTW.

I made basements the 'old fashioned' TS2 way, without constrainfloorelevation cheats.

The trick is to excavate a hole where you want the basement with three minimum flights of steps.

After deleting the steps, drag a room for the basement at the lowest level. The ground will auto level.

Finally drag foundation to the tops of the basement walls.

The WA basement facility is only useful for retro-fitting houses with basements where none was previously installed.

The working windows is a useful trick for split-level houses (houses on steep slopes), although I see no suitable plots for such adventurous design, although I suppose a basement lit with high mounted windows is a realistic option.

[Madame Mim]

Mirelly, forgive me if I'm wrong, but I think that Claeric's point is to avoid that three step trick and the magic landing of Sim confusion. Every time I've made a basement using that landing trick I've eventually been forced to delete the stairs and rebuild them, sometimes also having to reset sims because they get confused about how to negotiate that landing.

Thanks for the tutorial Claeric, I'll give it a try.

[Claeric]

Yeah, the point is to avoid all that. Here there is an extra step or two, but it allows you to have a straight down stairway with no landing, as well as functional windows (which adds to the outside of the house, too.). So the extra steps contribue to the look of the house and the look of the stairs.

Also I realized earlier that if you put the foundation ALL TH EWAY around the basement wall(so that it is closed), the floor tiles can be dragged over the whole thing. When I did it, I didn't close the foundation, and so I had issues.

[Goggalor]

It is possible to make stairs without landings at foundation height. The square were the stairs landing would be (carpeted in the first picture) needs to be raised slightly with constrainfloorelevation false:



After it is raised, set constrainfloorelevation to true, and place your stair.



Set constrainfloorelevation back to false and even first the ground level and then the 1st floor level (it will rise to 1-storey height when the ground is leveled.)



These images shows normal foundation and a squished wall, but it worked fine with your basement wall technique as well. Unfortunately most privacy windows are placed a bit low on the wall for this and gets cut off slightly.