The Sims 4 Open Apartments Mod: Official Introduction

Visit your multi-unit neighbors seamlessly, without a loading screen!

The loading screen standing between you and your neighbors has been DEFEATED. In a Residential Rental, you can now walk your Sim next door, knock, hang out in your neighbor’s place, and then head home again, all without a single loading screen!

🕒 Download: Patreon
Requires: For Rent Expansion Pack
Supported Languages: All 🌍

How It Works

As we’re all painfully aware, The Sims 4 only allows one lot to load at a time. Open Apartments sidesteps that for Residential Rentals by saving and instancing a neighboring unit’s furniture and Sims on demand.

After the initial setup (more on that below), simply click a neighbor’s front door or anywhere inside their unit and you’ll get a dialog with two options:

• Drop By: the seamless, no-loading-screen visit
• Travel: the normal loading-screen trip

Choose Drop By and your active Sim walks over and knocks. If anyone age Child or older is home, the unit loads, an event starts, and a resident comes to greet you and invite you in. From there, you just play.

See It In Action

Who’s Home

When you drop by, the unit can load with the following household members:

• Sims age Toddler and up
• Infants in their cribs
• Newborns in their bassinets
• Cats and dogs

Some residents won’t be there:

• Anyone away at work or school (they’ll show up once their shift ends)

The following household members aren’t supported yet and will be skipped:

• Horses
• Farm animals
• Small pets

Neighbors settle into their own routines while you visit, and because your Sims are guests in their space, they’re treated like visitors, not residents.

ℹ️ By default, only the Sims you originally chose in the picker to Drop By will freely walk into the neighbor’s unit. If you want any other Sim in your household to be able to go in autonomously, just direct them into the unit once (or have them interact with something inside it) and then they’ll come and go freely.

Managing a Drop By

The Drop By is managed by an event, and only one Drop By can be active at a time. The event lasts either until you end it or until every household resident age Child or older has left for work or school (at which point it wraps up on its own). To end a Drop By, just end the event; the neighbors will route back to their own units.

During an active Drop By you won’t be able to enter Build Mode. This is a safety precaution. Build Mode unlocks again a few in-game minutes after the Drop By ends, once everything has been cleaned up.

By default, the Sims you’re visiting won’t be allowed to wander into your own household’s unit. If you’d like to let them in, click your unit’s front door and choose: Allow the {Household} to Enter

You can also send them back to their own unit this way without ending the event. Simply choose: Prevent the {Household} from Entering

How to Set Up the Mod

Setup is mostly automatic.

Before the mod can recreate a unit for a Drop By, it first needs to capture what’s inside of the unit. A unit’s data can be captured in the following ways:

• Automatically, just by being there. Whenever a unit is the one currently loaded (your own home on every save load, for instance), the mod captures it.
• By Traveling there the normal way. Take the loading-screen Travel into a neighbor’s unit and it’s captured on arrival. From then on, you can use the “Drop By” option.
• By making a Manage Worlds pass. Enter Build Mode on the building from the world map. This loads and captures every unit in the building at once, which is the fastest way to prep a whole building.

Captured data is stored in its own file alongside your save game, so you typically only need to capture a unit once per save file. After that, it’ll update on its own whenever you make edits to the lot.

If you don’t have data saved for a particular unit you’re trying to visit, the mod will let you know and offer to Travel there the normal way, which captures it for next time.

Known Issues

• Some modular furniture instances imperfectly. Corner counters and corner cabinets don’t retain their join when instanced during a Drop By.
• Appropriateness feedback is limited. Neighbors will react to your Sim being inappropriate in their unit, but they currently don’t keep track of how many times you’ve been inappropriate or notify you the way they would during a normal visit.
• Only visits are supported. Break-Ins and Eavesdropping aren’t supported at this time, and landlord interactions like maintenance requests are untested, so treat them as unsupported too.
• Save from Live Mode when you can. Saving and exiting straight from the Manage Worlds map is safe for your game, but it can skip the mod’s data update. Whenever you edit a Residential Rental, return to Live Mode and save there to keep your captures current.

ℹ️ This mod was a huge undertaking, and while I’ve tested it thoroughly, there’s always a chance something slipped through.

Future Plans

There are a lot of ways this mod can be expanded. Here’s what’s currently on my mind:

• Resolve known issues
• Relationship-aware visits, where neighbors on bad terms can refuse to answer the door, and a Sim who misbehaves can get scolded and eventually shown out
• Explore if this functionality can be expanded to City Living apartments
• Explore if this functionality can be expanded to residential lots within a neighborhood

If you’d like to support this mod and its development, please consider subscribing!

Compatibility & Download

• This mod is compatible with Better Apartment & Rental Behaviors by lunar_britney.
• This mod most likely conflicts with Dimmed Inactive Rentals and Labeled Rental Units by TwistedMexi. Open Apartments dims inactive units and labels units on its own.
• This mod does not directly overwrite any files
• I’ve taken every precaution to safeguard the mod’s functions against other mods, but if for some reason you experience a conflict, please let me know and I’ll look into it!
• Mod is in early access and will become public in 2-3 weeks