I don’t know how to explain why this latest update to The Sims 4 is so exciting for me, because the main thing that has been added to the game are customizable stairs. I promise that is not at all as boring as it sounds.
Prior to this update, every staircase you put inside of a house ended up looking like this:
No matter what, staircase placement has fucked up my interior designs. You either need to create a narrow hallway for that staircase, making your house more cramped, or leave them out in the open, which looks weird and takes up a lot of space, including the unusable single tile behind the staircase. It’s bogus.
Now, I have options. Staircases can look like this:
That landing creates a lot of opportunities to organize a space in a different way. This Sims 4 update does a lot more than making just one landing, though. Maybe you’d prefer it to be higher up:
Or maybe you’d prefer two landings:
Hmm, actually, maybe the stairs should go the other way:
You can even sorta make stairs curve around themselves like a spiral staircase:
The possibilities aren’t quite endless, but they are much more plentiful than before. Even my simplest builds now feel more spacious.
In playing around with these stairs, I realized why they’re arriving with The Sims 4’s fifth anniversary. Building in this game now feels radically different; layouts are much less formulaic. The stairs are a huge change for other reasons, too. Sims in all life stages walk up and down stairs, as well as cats and dogs in all of their life stages as well. Considering how wonky pathing can be in The Sims 4, getting each of these kinds of characters to reliably walk up and down segmented stairs may have been a challenge.
So many parts of this game are adjacent to stairs that I now get why a change that seems so simple took so long. Now all I want to do is to experiment more with this new feature and see how many other ways it changes how my Sims live.