Welcome to my Ultimate Architecture Tutorial.

I'm going to show you some of the tricks I've pieced together over the last year. We're going to build a pagoda to showcase these tricks, but you can use them with any type of structure.

I learned all these things by reading tutorials on modthesims2.com and other places, and by trial and error. many thanks to Daithnaoz7, MikeInside, and countless others who've shared their knowledge on modthesims2.com!

First of all, to really be able to do great architecture, you're going to need to modify some of the game's configuration.

BE CAREFUL! This changes the way Build mode works, so I highly recommend that you first make backups of the file we'll be changing!

Go to C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\Catalog\Scripts

Open the walls.txt file.

Under the section "# normal walls", make sure that 'requiresFlatBottom' and 'requiresFlatTop' are both set to false (if it's not there, type it in)

Save the file, and get ready to build awesome things!

For today's tutorial, let's use a 2x3 lot. Make sure the ground is nice and flat.
You should always start by building a scaffolding. It will allow you to do all sorts of interesting things.
Use the square wall tool and drag walls just two tiles away from the edge of your terrain.

Go up one floor and do it again...

And again on the third floor,

And on the fourth

And on the fifth. At this point, you'll notice that unless you have the EP, you can't build above the fifth floor. We can't even tile above it. Since we're going to make our roof out of tile, that's a bummer.

But wait! there's a trick we can use to get access to the sixth-floor tile... Let's fool the game!

Get a roof dormer, and 'try' to position it as shown, on the fifth floor.

The game won't let you. It will say that you can't intesect walls. But it will give us the sixth-floor tiles.
Delete the dormer if it did stick, and let's move on to creating stealth stairs.

BRING UP THE CONSOLE by pressing Ctrl+Shift+C
In the console, type:
boolprop constrainfloorelevation false
and hit enter.
We're now in what I call "deform mode".
In Deform Mode, we can use the deform tools on the ground, and it will deform the tiles above it. On floors above the ground, we can only use the level tool. So we'll deform the ground below our scaffolding, and use the level tool to carry the scaffolding's deform to the tiles on our floors.

Confused? Don't worry, it will all become very clear soon.

Get a set of modular stairs, and place them on the ground along the scaffolding.

Do it again on the now lowered ground tile,

And a third time.

You'll notice the tiles above have been deformed, as the ground was lowered by the stairs.

Stairs are very useful, because they lower flat ground by four "clicks". The "click" is the lowest amount of deform you can do. It turns out that a normal floor in sims2 is 16 clicks high. This is very important: If you make a floor that is less than 16 clicks high, with tile above it, sims will refuse to walk there, because the ceiling is too low for them. So remember: Floors are 16 clicks.

Another magic number is four clicks. You can't bring two floors closer together than four clicks. Once you get to four clicks height in your wall, it will start pushing the other floors rather than compress anymore.

So by laying down three sets of stairs, we've lowered the ground by 3x4=12 clicks, which is 4 clicks less than 16, which would be a full floor.

Okay, now watch this:

If you go up to the sixth floor, you'll notice that there's a dent in the wall. At the bottom of it is a flat tile area.

Put your leveling tool there...

And drag accross to the overhang on the next wall.

Then drag from that lowered tile to the far overhang...

And again...

And one final time.

We've just lowered the sixth floor by twelve clicks. Now it's four clicks above the fifth floor, which is as close as it will get.

Go down to the fifth floor,

And do the same thing there.

When you're done, do it on the next lower floor, and again until you reach the ground. Don't lower the ground.

Now, we've got a nicely compressed building, except for the shark's tooth poking out of it. If you like logical reasoning, try to figure out why it appeared.
If you just want to get things done, let me show you how we get rid of it.

On the second floor, drag accross the side, starting at a low tile.

Same on the third floor,

And the fourth and fifth and sixth.