During the demonstration of how build mode is going to work, we can also see that in the bottom right corner of the screen that there is a series of hotkeys for easy and quick building.

Lots of us who build already in The Sims will be used to using keyboard commands – like using the bracket keys to change the size of objects – so it won’t be long before Paralives builders also have these keys committed to memory.

Pre-made swatches as well as custom colour selection

As well as having pre-made swatches for items, you will also be able to customise items using their style creation feature.

This is going to mean that objects that might have only suited a certain build or aesthetic with pre-made swatches can be customised to fit any home or build, making every object so much more usable.

As well as just picking two individual colours for your items, we also saw that you can customise the colours of different parts – like picking the bed frame colour and the sheets separately. It definitely is reminiscent of the Sims 2 in that way, and gives players many more customisable options to make their Para’s homes feel unique.

Object size customisation

Once you select an object to place, you will notice that ones that can be customised in size will have either the blue arrows on each side (as in the left image) or a yellow sliding arrow (in the right image).

This doesn’t appear on all the items – the lamps, for example, cannot be increased/decreased in size, but other items like rugs, photos, and clutter items can.

Whilst in games like The Sims you can resize items, in Paralives’ build mode, you are not restricted to increasing only by 2x or 3x as it looks to be a sliding scale.

Object length customisation

Using the Paralvies build tools, we’re going to be able to customise the size and length of so many different items. This is something that caught the eye of any player who can spend hours in build mode and unlocks tons of customisable options.

Simple customisations like being able to change the length of a curtain or turn a single bed into a double bed give us so much more freedom to make homes unique and grow with our Paras.

Sometimes something as simple as being able to make curtains longer or shorter is enough to make people excited – who among us has had their perfect Sims build scorned by a curtain that doesn’t fit the windows? It looks like with Paralives that will be a worry of the past!

Grid-free placements

One thing that caught my eye when watching the teasing of build mode for Paralives was the absence of grid placements. We saw that there was effortless placement of objects like plants and bookshelves, without the need to alt-place or use something like the bb.moveobjects cheat, which many of us are used to.

Also, as mentioned in a recent post covering everything we know about Paralives so far, for anyone who does prefer to use a grid there will be an optional one you can use.

360° rotation

No longer will building mean objects can only rotate 45 degrees! Paralives’ build mode will let us rotate objects freely.