How to Lighten Dark Rooms Without Lamps

This is a quick and easy build mode tutorial on how to lighten up your dark rooms. Using tons of lamps in a room might not be too ideal, but there is a simple trick to solve this annoying issue!

Introduction

I built this simple house for demonstration purposes and will be showing you how to brighten up dark rooms without having to use too many lamps in every corner of the room. However, the main purpose is to show how to brighten up your garages that you have attached to the house. If you would like to know how to attach a garage to the foundation of your house, please check out my first guide here.


Once you have followed those steps and attached your garage to your house (as shown on the left picture), we can move on to the interior. The first step will show you how to extend the foundation within the house and then moving on to the next steps to brighten up the entire garage without using too many lamps (this method can be used for any rooms).

Step 1

Apply the Cheat Code

First of all, you need to activate the cheat. Simply press [CTRL] + [SHIFT] + C to display the console window. Type constrainfloorelevation false to force terrain adjustments regardless of objects, Sims, and other structures. Hit [ENTER] and you're good to go!

Step 2

Extending the Foundation

Once you've done that, we can move on to extending your house's foundation from the inside of the house. The main idea is to have a door leading to the garage and when going through that door, stairs will lead your Sims to the ground base of the garage.



Using the foundation tool, click and drag across the inside of your garage (see picture 1 above) and leave some space for your car(s) and other objects if needed. I built a very small garage because my intention was to only have a few mopeds and bicycles in there instead of a huge car. You can then place your door, build a fence and place your stairs to finish off the indoor entrance to the garage (see picture 2 above).

Step 3

Decorating

You can now start decorating your garage. As mentioned in step 2, I've only used a few bicycles and mopeds and put up some wall decorations to spice up the look and make it more homely.


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From your ground level, go to the main floor level and place any lamp of your choice (see picture below).


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When you've placed your lamp(s), you will be able to tell that nothing really changed dramatically in regards to light and the only real light in the room is the natural light coming from the doors/windows. We're going to use simple tricks to brighten up everything.

Step 4

More Cheats!

We now need to enable two important and crucial cheats in order to brighten up this dark garage. So, like we did in the first step, press [CTRL] + [SHIFT] + C to display the console window. Type testingcheatsenabled ON, which is a debugging cheat. Hit [ENTER].



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Now all we have to do is enable our last cheat. Press [CTRL] + [SHIFT] + C to display the console window. Type buydebug and hit [ENTER] to unlock a Buy Mode slot with many debug objects (such as Butterfly/Beetle/Gem generators, mature Plants, etc.). We won't be touching those generators and other objects, because all we need from these hidden objects are the ceiling area lights!

Step 5

Finalising

Go to Buy mode and you will see a question mark above the object's categories. This is our hidden Buy Mode that we just unlocked.

Click on the question mark and go to the Miscellaneous section to find all the different sized ceiling lights. These lights will be barely visible on the icons as shown in the screenshot below, so it's easy to spot them. Check out the different sizes of the lights by clicking on them and choose the one that suits the size of your garage/room the most (in this case, I went for the Circular Ceiling Area Light 4x4.


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Now go to the very bottom of your house (base ground), as shown on the picture below, and place as many of those ceiling lights as you need (I just needed one of those since the size was fitting perfectly into the garage).


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Then, going to the level above (foundation level), place more lights to brighten up the whole room. In this case, I put another one of those circular lights on top of the first one.



(Please note that these ceiling lights won't be visible in Live mode. Only the light source remains.)

Was it helpful?

Examples

Here are a few before and after examples of using the hidden ceiling lights.



As you can see, the ceiling lights really do make a huge difference and give your room a gloomy look. You can finally stop using tons of lamps in every corner of your room and make a room look pretty with just a few lamps and using the hidden ceiling lights. It gives such a nice cosy and warm atmosphere to the entire room, especially because you can control how much of that hidden light you want - you can use just one small ceiling light in the middle of the room or lighten up the entire room by using multiple ceiling lights.



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I hope you found this tutorial helpful. I'm not really used to writing guides and I'm actually very bad at explaining things (especially in English because it's my third language), but I hope I explained myself well enough in this guide to help you :}

Please leave a comment if you have any questions or requests and I will be happy to help you.

Thanks a lot for reading, you can check out my YouTube Channel for my Sims videos! HAPPY SIMMING!

[yeresin]

i need that house in the picture right now

[sqworm]

@Altruistic Muffin

You have to remember, EA made it so players could access the cheat menu, they could have easily restricted it to just themselves.

Plus, as far as i know, nobody uses the cheats to actually cheat in game, just give them more options for things like decorations, for example there's paintings of outer space that aren't normally available for some reason. But they're literally just like the ones in the base game functionality wise.

To me, a bad cheat would be if we were allowed to unlock all lifetime awards for all sims or something like that.

[SeHwa]

thx

[alison.cutler]

Make more please!
:D :D :D :D :D :D

[alison.cutler]

:) I just did buydebug and made a garden.

[Korgi]

How do you have the nice graphics? Mine are total shit.

[⸸★]

Thank you, I've seen these before playing around with 'Buy Mode' but I thought they'd be visible in 'Live Mode'.

[chloe1235]

PLEASE MAKE MORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Altruistic Muffin]

meh this seemed too cheat based, i expected mabye some compisiton work mixed in with mabye candles extra windows and mabye wall paint, like emphasie on white, but this didnt seem ok

[rkoufii]

how do you get those lights?