Tracing blueprints in Paralives is so easy it freed me from 25 years of The Sims’ grid-based tyranny

Life sim player tradition (or stubborness?) dictates I often attempt to build a real house—my childhood home or one I drove past last week—and yet in The Sims, I always wind up frustrated that the series’ grid-based building has never been able to quite replicate actual floor plans. I’ve become totally enamored with building in Paralives because its gridless, real world measurements make so many designs possible, even going so far as just slapping a real life blueprint into the game and tracing it.

In the week after Paralives launched, lots of players were sharing the possibilities of importing custom images. One trick, which just requires a small mod, is uploading an image of a real blueprint and putting it onto a rug which you can use like a guide to draw all your walls in Build Mode. Incredibly it just… works?

How to use a custom rug floor plan in Paralives

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1. Download Bunny’s Customizable Rug in the Steam Workshop
2. Save an image on your PC of a floor plan you want to replicate (one that shows measurements, ideally)
3. Use the search function (magnifying glass) in the Build Mode menu to find Bunny’s Custom Rug
4. Click the “change image” picture icon and scroll down to find the custom image “+” button
5. Import your blueprint image and resize the rug to the correct scale
6. Make sure to toggle the grid off when building walls and verify you’re using the matching measurement type (metric or imperial) in your game settings
7. Trace your walls!