Ever since mermaids were brought to The Sims 4 in the Island Living expansion pack, I have been obsessed with the idea of underwater homes for mermaids to live in but the game doesn’t exactly make that easy to achieve. We can’t build underground on waterfront lots and there are a lot of limitations about where and how pools can be placed underground. This can make designing an underwater home tricky.
Luckily, mermaids don’t really need a lot on land to be comfortable. They can do everything in the water except eat. This… doesn’t really make a lot of sense considering the ocean is full of aquatic creatures and vegetation that mermaids could eat but this is The Sims 4 where logic doesn’t exist. So mermaids need a way to prepare food on land. All their other needs can be taken care of in the water. This makes designing an underwater home for them a bit easier since the only essential room is a kitchen.
Of course, there’s no shortage of underwater homes in the Gallery and I wanted to add an extra layer of challenge. I decided my home for a group of mermaids would be made entirely of glass, including the floor and the ceiling and that it would be entirely enclosed by water on all sides. I spent a long time figuring out the mechanics of how that would work but once I figured out the concept, the rest of the build came easy.
I used the shipwreck lot in Sulani as a base because I thought it was already set up nicely for what I wanted to do. All I would need to do is bulldoze the terrible living quarters underground and replace it with my underwater mermaid home. I put a pool on the ground floor that would serve as the water above the glass ceiling below it. Then inside the shipwreck, I had a ladder going down two levels to where the living space would be. A small hallway leads to a kitchen and lounge area with glass partition walls separating the bedroom. Mermaids don’t technically need to sleep in a bed; they can sleep in the water, but I thought my mermaids would like a spot to WooHoo other than the waterfall in the area.
I surrounded the entire living space with an underground pool and used floor-to-ceiling windows on all the walls. For the floor and ceiling, I used the glass floor panels that come with Island Living. The home is 100% glass all the way around. Getting water underneath the floor of this home was the tricky part; I couldn’t put a pool directly underneath the home. I had to put an empty room below the living space and then put a pool below that so there is open space underneath the floor, but you still see water when you look through the floor.
Since the home is made entirely of glass, that made decorating the space easy. Apart from a few plants here and there, the home has almost no décor. After all, why do you need décor when the aquatic life all around you is the décor? I spent a lot of time decorating the pool areas around and underneath the home to make it look like the open waters of Sulani; teeming with coral reefs, fish, and lost pieces of culture. There are live, animated fish swimming in the waters surrounding the house that you can see through the floors and windows. I stocked many aquariums with tropical fish, then sized down the aquariums to their smallest size. The fish inside the aquarium remain the same size so I could cover up the aquarium with rocks and coral to make it look like the fish were swimming in open waters.
For some personal touches on the ground level, I added a little seating area with a pit BBQ, a bonfire, and a hut for my mermaid’s pets. Pets can’t use ladders to access the underwater home so my mermaid needed to make sure her pets would be comfortable on the ground floor. I also used some foliage to disguise the edges of the pool and make it look more like a natural body of water.
Oh, and if you were wondering about that chest that no one can figure out how to open? I preserved it. Just in case someone does manage to open it one day.
If you’d like this edit of the shipwreck lot in your own game, click the link below to go to the Gallery and save it to your library!
Outstanding! The only residents of Sulani in my Simworld are mermaids, and so I work hard to make the homes mermaid-friendly, but that shipwreck house has always been a broken home.
Are you using some kind of retexture mod? The game looks different