Tips and Tricks

[Kimi]

I thought I would start this for anyone who has found something useful to let us know about. I spent about 10 minutes looking for something that Klinn had posted about. Hopefully this will keep us better organized. 

[Klinn]

The ALT Key Is Like The Sims' MoveObjects Cheat

When placing furniture or other items in your house, they'll turn red if the game thinks they're overlapping. You can override this by holding the ALT key. It's kind of like The Sims' MoveObjects cheat code. Be careful not to block access to an item or Zois won't be able to use it.

The ALT key also lets you overlap other things too, such as sections of a roof to make more complex arrangements. It can even let you rotate objects freely, rather than just in 45-degree increments.

[Klinn]

Creating House Foundations

Creating a foundation for a house is not difficult, but only once you know which tools to use when. That's the trick.

Step 1: Create the walls of your building in the usual manner. As you do this, you'll probably be using the Selection Tool to pick individual wall sections to delete them or change their size. Don't worry about getting everything exactly right, you'll be able to edit the rooms later.

 

Note that if you pick the floor of a room and try to pull it up, only that floor will move. You won't get a foundation.

 

Step 2: Switch to the "Room Selection Tool / Create a Surface" instead of the regular Selection tool. No, I have no idea what that popup description is really supposed to be telling us.

 

Step 3: Click on the house to select it, then as usual click the 3-axis button to bring up all the gizmos for making adjustments.

 

Note that amongst all the gizmos there's now an arrow pointing up. It's roughly in the middle of screenshot below.

 

Step 4: Grab that arrow gizmo and pull it up and voilà, your house now has a foundation. Easy once you know the trick, right?

 

Bonus Tip: If you've created a small "room" at the front of the house and then delete the unneeded walls around it, you'll end up with a porch at the same level as the rest of foundations. Add some stairs going up and railings to suit.

So the basic trick to creating foundations is to use the "Room Selection Tool / Create a Surface" instead of the regular Selection Tool. Hope this helps!

 

[Kimi]

[Klinn]

Different Textures On One Floor

The game will always fill an entire contiguous floor area with a single texture.

But suppose you have a hallway with an opening into a kitchen. You want the kitchen part to have a tile floor and the hallway a wood floor. Well, you can't. But we can sorta fake it.

Normally the only way to do this is to add a wall and door dividing the kitchen from the hallway to keep one texture from bleeding into the other room.

But I really really want just an opening, not a door. After texturing the two floors differently, if you remove the temporary walls and door to create a simple opening connecting the two rooms, the game now decides it's just one big floor and repaints both areas with the one texture. Sigh.

As of the March 30th update, the only way I can find around this is to use the "Door Frame" object instead of a normal door.

The game will treat this as a separator between rooms and keep the floors the way they were textured. Use multiple door frames to create what sort of looks like a wider opening between the rooms.

It's not perfect but it's best we can do at the moment. Perhaps in the future the developers will add wider "door frames" or arches for us to use.

Happy building!

 

[RedMallie]

Thank you, Kimi for making this thread, and Klinn for your super useful and easy to follow tutorials!!!

I think that the devs are listening to feedback, so I'd like to believe that they will provide either a wider door arch, or the option to select the area to fill with different floor styles.

Now, Klinn, I tried your tutorial on a prebuilt house in the Building Studio, but I could not get the house to get a foundation. I've not had time to try very carefully, and I did not have your tutorial open when I did, so I will try it again a.s.a.p., but did you try it on the Building Studio before you got the game, please?

[Klinn]

Red, yes I did create a foundation in the Building Studio of the demo and then again in the early access release and it worked the same way.

However, I've only used that method when creating new houses from scratch. Never on an existing prebuilt house. Which house were you experimenting with? I'll check it out and see what happens on my end.

[Firestaar1]

Great idea for a thread Kimi!  and thanks Klinn for already posting some helpful stuff!

[RedMallie]

 

 

Thanks, Klinn!!

I'm not on my PC, so I'll get back to you on which house I tried this. It'd be very interesting to learn from what you do.

[RedMallie]

Well, Nexus Mods has mods for InZoi now. Maybe this could be in its own thread, but for now, I think it may be posted here?

Of course, using mods at the stage in the development of the game needs to be carefully considered by each player, but I think the information should be shared.

I am a leftie and the controls were killing me. There is this mod to be able to use the arrows on the right of the keyboard and it has made a HUGE difference for me in my play from just today. I hope that the devs will make an update that will allow the controls to be switched to the arrows, but in the meantime, I'll keep testing this mod.

A different mod creator shared these mods; one to silence the piano music while in Building mode and another to silence the music in all menus. For me, two more lifesavers.

I was totally intent on testing the game again as it is, but when I found these mods, well. They really did the experience much better for me. I'm now back into the game.

[Klinn]

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Measure Wall Length Using Wall Cost

When building a wall, each grid square costs 1 meow. So when creating a wall you can see the length of it by looking at the cost. 16 meows = 16 grid squares. You can easily create a second wall the same length by keeping an eye on the cost as you draw it out.

 

A little fancier -- we can create two 45-degree angled doors at the end of a hallway by creating two wall segments 4 squares long (cost = 4) and adding a short wall section to connect them.

 

Add doors and you've got fancy entrances to two adjacent rooms.

 

Anyway, by using the wall cost to tell you the wall length, you can more easily create precise layouts.

[RedMallie]

 

[Firestaar1]

Oh that's quite handy! 

[Klinn]

Skip Intro With a Click

While testing the game and restarting over and over, I got really sick of watching that young girl running and panting on her way to the interview.

I believe there are some mod(s) to skip the intro but even easier is to simply click on the screen somewhere, anywhere. The ESC key does nothing, there are no command line arguments I know of, but a click is all it takes. Wish I had known that a month ago! 

 

[RedMallie]

  You've been the most patient with that intro!!!!

I did get a mod to skip it, but if I can, I'd rather not use too many mods at the time.