Me doing that to advanced Sims builders is like how you watch the figure skating at the Winter Olympics once every four years and, after a human at the peak of their physical fitness performs a stunning feat of graceful athleticism, you go “He totally screwed the landing there,” whilst spraying Wotsit dust from your open mouth. Last night I spent four hours building a rudimentary and not that tiny Tiny Home, and with my definitive expertise I have identified the best item in the pack. Possibly the best item in all of The Sims 4. Brief context is that Graham and I both got The Sims 4 because we thought the idea of the Tiny Living Stuff Pack was really cool, and have discovered that in the six years since The Sims 4 first launched it has become a great little toy box - like Lego that doesn’t take up space in your house. I aggressively challenged Graham to a Tiny Build-Off, so I eagerly bought Tiny Living as soon as it arrived last night. The results are probably bigger than my actual flat. I can see where I wasted space and where to squish walls in. I’m pretty proud of the rooftop patio, though. It has commanding views of the burger place over the river.
This home, by the way, fulfils almost none of the rules set for our Tiny Build-Off. There is no room for a child, I spent almost double the budget, it uses custom content and I went three and a half hours over the time limit. I am gravely concerned that Graham is going to win by default because I spent too much time and money on pot plants. Anyway, point is, the Tiny Living pack comes with new items that you can only buy and use if you have the pack. All of the DLC does, which is why The Sims 4, despite the community and developers being impassioned and sincere, is a money farm against which I am ethically opposed (except not really because I might buy Discover University just for this one shower you can get). When you build things in The Sims you quickly become aware of its limitations. You can use cheats to shuffle objects closer than where the game automatically snaps them, but your Sim still needs to be able to use them, or it doesn’t count as a successful build, and some things are… frustrating. But the Tiny Living pack includes an item that is the Holy Grail for me, a woman who exists at the intersection of ‘saving space in The Sims builds’ and ‘my Sims must read books for reading is life’. Reading requires an item that has books on, which is usually a shelf of some description. And there are lovely shelves which are cutesy and small and modern. But they all need space for The Sim to be able to interact with them, to pick up a book and browse, and this means that other objects can’t clip too far into their interaction zone. This will not do. So allow me to introduce the best new item in Tiny Living. You can keep your knitwear and your Murphy bed that will probably kill you. Check this bad boy out:
That, mate, is a fully functional set of books, between two little succulent book ends, and it can fit on top of any surface. Game changer. Game absolutely changed. Just, blown away. You don’t even understand. Now, Maxis: give me bunk beds or give me death.
