InZoi’s Build Mode Resembles The Sims… But Takes a Unique Turn

InZoi, the first real attempt ever to compete with The Sims in the life sim space, is here, releasing via Steam Early Access, and it’s only natural that players will spend their first several hours in the game creating their characters and messing around in build mode to see what kinds of dollhouses they can assemble. There’s no point in jumping into the simulation until you’ve got everything else in order.

For those Sims players who are eager to see what InZoi’s got that The Sims doesn’t, be warned that InZoi’s build mode has a few big quirks that you’ll need to learn about before you get started, or else you might accidentally rip the walls out of your house while you’re trying to make it bigger. Fortunately, we’ve got you covered with our InZoi build mode guide.

How InZoi’s home-building gameplay differs from the Sims

If you’re coming to InZoi from The Sims 4, you’ll probably be used to a build mode in which everything is one context-sensitive click away. Clicking on an object picks it up; clicking on a wall lets you move it to expand or contract the room it’s containing. You just click on what you want to manipulate, and then you manipulate it. InZoi’s build mode is slightly more complicated than that, thanks largely to the fact that it has more customization options–but there are some fundamental differences from The Sims that will probably trip you up at first.

The first of these big differences is that you need to choose the right selection mode. By default, your cursor is using the standard “Selection Tool,” which lets you click on and manipulate individual objects, like your couch. When you’re in the mode, moving a wall will move only the wall–the room the wall belonged to won’t change aside from no longer having a wall. If you want to change the size of a room, or make your house bigger, you’ll instead need to choose the Room Selection Tool, which you can find on the build mode options bar near the top of the UI, immediately to the right of the standard Selection Tool.

It’s in that part of Build Mode–the part where you’re dealing with furniture, appliances, and anything else you might put in your house–where you’ll find another quirk you’ll need to remember. In InZoi, you can customize your furniture just as deeply as you can customize your clothing, but you can only do so after you have placed the item in question. So you would, say, pick a couch you like from the build menu, place it in your home, and click on it to bring up the option to customize it–then you’ll be presented with a pile of options for texture and color, and you can upload your own texture images yourself if you want, or use InZoi’s built-in AI image generator to make one. If you want all your furniture to be covered in pictures of your dog, you can do that.

This after-the-fact customization causes no issues for things like your refrigerator, but since everything you can place in build mode works the same way, there are certain things where this becomes a problem. For example, if you want to add a staircase that turns 180 degrees halfway up, you’ll have to place a full straight flight of stairs first and then bend it afterward. Since the purpose of such a staircase is to save on the horizontal space that the staircase takes up, having it work this way defeats that purpose because you have to make room for the full normal staircase anyway. You’ll have to exercise a bit of cleverness to deal with this issue when it arises.

Once you understand these two basic aspects, most builders will be ready to go in InZoi; build mode is otherwise largely similar to that of The Sims but with a redesigned UI. But we’d be remiss if we forgot to point out one other strange thing about InZoi’s build mode that has no equivalent in The Sims.

When I set up my first Zoi family, I put them in what looks like the first floor of a small apartment building in Dowon, which you can see above–it has a communal space with a gym on the ground floor, with three floors of living space above it. My family lived on the first of those floors, but I soon realized that I had no neighbors, and there was no access point for the upper two floors.

The whole building belonged to my family, and I just had to build new staircases to get up there–I had three times more space to work with than I’d thought, and my small apartment turned into a large house in minutes. It was a pretty surprising development since this is not how a building like this works in real life, and the game had made no attempt to tell me that I could do that. This is something to keep in mind when you start feeling like your family needs more space–you might already have it.

InZoi launches in Early Access on Steam on March 27 for $40. Until the game officially launches, players can download the InZoi Creative Studio for free. Through the 22nd, you’ll unlock access by watching InZoi streams on Twitch or the game’s Steam store page. Starting on the 23rd, the Creative Studio will be available to download on Steam without requiring any tasks.