Why can't I place floors in Paralives?

Because flooring is a paint surface, not something an enclosed room generates. Open the Paint category in build mode, choose Flooring, and click inside the room. If part of the room still shows bare ground, that part is a separate zone — a separator, a platform edge or a stair cut-out — and has to be painted on its own.

How do I turn a lot into a house in Paralives?

Draw the full wall outline first, shorten those walls so the ground storey becomes a foundation, move up a floor and build the house on top, then paint floors and walls, then add doors, windows, stairs and roof. The order matters because a placed room cannot be moved afterwards.

How do I make the game see two separate rooms?

Put a separator across the space. It draws like a wall from the wall tools and then becomes invisible, and the game treats each side as its own zone for floor materials, wall paint and floor height. You can also convert an existing wall or fence into a separator from its three-dot menu.

Where is the foundation button in Paralives?

There is no foundation button. A Paralives developer described the studio's method on the Steam forums: build a first floor, select one of its walls, drag the height arrow down so the storey is short, and treat that squat storey as the foundation. Stairs then snap to the raised edge.

Why is there a gap under my floor?

A raised platform is a floor at height, not a solid block, so the ground under it stays open. Ring the raised section with short walls and paint them separately if you want it to read as a foundation; leave separators there if you want a deck that looks like it floats.

Should I build with the grid on or off in Paralives?

On, until the shell is up. The grid keeps opposite walls aligned and furniture predictable; press G to drop it when you need a curve, an angle or a connection to an off-grid house. It is a per-moment choice, not a mode you pick once.

Paralives Build Mode Rooms Explained

The short answer

Walls first, then height, then paint

Paralives has no foundation button and no room stamp. You draw walls to make a footprint, shorten those walls so the ground storey becomes a foundation, then paint the floor and wall surfaces yourself — nothing appears on its own. A space only counts as its own room once a wall or a separator closes it off, which is why an open-plan kitchen and dining area behave as one room until you divide them. Once that order is in your head, build mode stops fighting you.

Start here

Which page do you actually want?

This page is the concept layer: why the tool you are hunting for is missing, and how the game decides what a room is. If you already know that and just want the clicks, these do the mechanics.

How to raise a foundation

The clicks: draw a room, shorten the walls, raise the platform, snap the stairs.

How to lay a floor

The clicks: find the flooring category, paint each zone, fix a room showing bare ground.

Walls that won't connect

The clicks: the 'different heights' error, the 'wall too short' message, visibility cycling.

Full first-house tutorial

Seventeen illustrated steps from empty lot to saved build, in order.

Unlearning The Sims

Ten habits that do not transfer

Every row is a real tool Sims players open the catalogue looking for. The middle column is what Paralives gives you instead, and the badge says how firmly we could confirm it: a statement from the studio, a creator demonstrating it on camera in the current build, or players agreeing without anyone showing it end to end.

What you're looking for	What Paralives does instead	Confirmed by
Foundation tool	There isn't one. A Paralives developer spelled out the studio's own method on the Steam forums: build a first floor, select one of its walls, and drag the height arrow down until the storey is short. That squat storey is the foundation, and the house goes on top of it.	Studio
Room or rectangle stamp	Rooms are drawn wall by wall. Switch on 'Start new wall automatically after placement' in Settings and the tool stays armed so you can trace a whole outline; it releases itself the moment the outline closes.	Demonstrated
Floors appear inside a room	Flooring is a paint surface, filed under Paint alongside wall coverings and ceiling finishes. An enclosed room shows bare ground until you paint it.	Demonstrated
A half wall to split a space	The separator does it. It sits in the wall tools next to full and half walls, draws like a wall, then disappears — leaving an invisible edge the game treats as a room boundary.	Demonstrated
One wall height per floor	Height is a per-wall property with its own arrow handle, so one storey can carry several ceiling heights. Half walls are the exception: their height is set before placement, and the arrow afterwards edits the full walls instead.	Demonstrated
A grid you can only switch off	The grid is optional and reshapeable. G turns it off, Alt suspends it mid-drag, Shift halves it, and the three-dot menu on any wall re-aligns the whole grid to that wall's angle or resizes its cells to that wall's length.	Demonstrated
Pick a room up and move it	You cannot reposition a placed room in Early Access. You can drag a single wall to stretch or shrink one — which is also the action most likely to glitch a room, so save first.	Demonstrated
Auto-roof button	Roof pieces are placed and joined by hand. The studio's roadmap lists more roof customisation as planned, and lists an auto-roof tool separately as something it is not committing to.	Studio
Dig out a basement	Basements are on the Early Access roadmap and are not in the game. A raised platform gives you the look of a walk-out lower level, not an actual underground storey.	Studio
Draw the lot outline	Not available in normal play. The lot perimeter tool only appears after a developer console command, which is how players subdivide the empty terrain.	Players

Lot to house

The order the game wants

Two of these seven are the ones people skip, and both are hard to walk back: the footprint, because a placed room cannot be moved; and the foundation, because raising the floor later means re-matching every adjoining section.

1
Get a lot you are allowed to edit
Build mode only opens on a lot your active household owns. To practise instead, start a new game from the main menu and choose the simple empty terrain rather than the town: no Para, no household, just a flat build box. Tab swaps between live and build mode, with no loading screen either way.
KeysTab
Full walkthrough
2
Change three settings before the first wall
Settings → General: turn Enable Autosave off while you build, so a glitched room can be undone by quitting without saving. Settings → Gameplay → Build Mode: 'Pause time while in build mode' keeps your Paras alive through a long session, and 'Start new wall automatically after placement' keeps the wall tool armed while you trace an outline.
3
Draw the whole footprint first
Walls, not rooms, are the unit here. Draw the entire outline before you decorate anything, because a placed room cannot be repositioned afterwards. Walls follow the grid by default; hold Alt to ignore it for one segment, or press G to switch it off entirely.
KeysBGAlt (hold)
4
Turn the ground floor into the foundation
Select one of the outline's walls and drag its height arrow down until the storey is short. Then move up one floor and build the house on top. This is the studio's own method, and it is why the foundation counts as floor one whenever you edit the building later.
KeysPage UpPage Down
Full walkthrough
5
Cut the interior into zones
Anywhere you want two floor materials, two wall colours or a change in floor height inside one open space, put a separator across it. Any existing wall — or a fence — can be converted into a separator from its three-dot menu, which makes it invisible while keeping the boundary.
6
Paint every surface, one zone at a time
Flooring, wall coverings and ceiling finishes all live under Paint. Nothing fills itself in and nothing spreads past a separator. The pipette copies a swatch off anything you have already painted, which is the fastest way to keep a house consistent.
KeysIAlt + left-click (pipette selected)
Full walkthrough
7
Then doors, windows, stairs and roof
Openings come last, because a wall you might still delete does not need a window in it. Stairs need something to snap to — the raised platform edge, ideally a separator rather than a full wall. Roofs are placed as pieces and joined; expect to reload the save when one refuses to line up.
KeysOCtrl + F
Full walkthrough

Room logic

What Paralives counts as a room

A room in Paralives is an area closed off by wall geometry. Full walls do it, half walls do it, and so does the separator — a wall you draw and then cannot see. That third one answers the most common version of this question: an open-plan kitchen and dining area is one room as far as the game is concerned, however you arrange the furniture, until something divides it.

Draw a separator across the space and the room still looks open, but the game now treats it as two zones. Paint stops at the line, floor materials stop at the line, and each side can sit at a different height. You do not have to draw a fresh one either: pick any existing wall, open its three-dot menu and convert it to a separator — the wall vanishes and the boundary stays. The same works on fences.

This is also why floors sometimes refuse to behave. Painting is per zone, so a room you thought was one surface may be two, and the cut-out under a staircase or around a platform edge has to be painted on its own. Ceilings work the same way and are painted from the same category.

Coming from The Sims, the instinct is to reach for a half wall when you want two rooms in one space. Reach for the separator instead: a half wall changes what the space looks like, a separator changes what the game thinks it is.

Half walls, full walls, and stacking them

Half walls are a separate wall type sitting beside full walls in the wall tools, and both draw straight or curved. The catch that costs people a rebuild: a half wall's height has to be set before you place it. Afterwards, both the height arrow and the blue floor arrow edit the full walls in that room, not the half wall.

There is no confirmed way to stack a full wall directly on top of a half wall as one pony-wall assembly. What builders do instead is run a full wall along the same line and shorten it, or draw the two as separate segments so a half wall fronts a full-height wall behind it. If the studio adds a proper stacking option we will update this — it is on the unconfirmed list below.

Read the full half-walls guide

The gap under a raised floor

Raise a platform and the ground underneath stays visible as an open band. That is expected: a platform is a floor at height, not a solid block. The fix that reads as a real foundation is to enclose the band — a ring of short walls around the raised section, painted separately from the walls above.

Using separators instead leaves the floating look but gives you no surface to paint, and builders report that deleting the flooring under a platform breaks stair placement. Short walls if you want the foundation to look solid; separators if you want the deck to look like it floats.

Do you build with the grid or without it?

Both, usually. The grid is on by default and drives wall placement through the Use grid for wall placement setting. G switches it off for good, Alt suspends it for one drag, and Shift halves it while you draw. Gridless is not a mode you commit to.

Reasons to keep it on

Wall ends land on the same points, so opposite sides of a house actually line up.
Furniture snapping stays predictable, which matters more once a room is full.
New saves place the grid aligned to the street on empty lots — a fix that shipped in patch 0.1.2 and only applies to save files created after it.
Any wall's three-dot menu re-aligns the grid to that wall's angle, so a diagonal wing gets a diagonal grid instead of no grid.

Reasons to turn it off

Curves, angles and small bump-outs need free placement; a grid cannot express them.
Pre-built and downloaded houses are often off-grid, so new walls will not meet the old ones until you drop it.
A Paralives developer's advice for the awkward lot beside the pharmacy is exactly this: grid off, start the wall at the front edge of the lot so it sits flush with the ground.
Snapping still happens near existing walls, so off-grid is not the same as unassisted.

If you are new, leave it on. Gridless building is the reason Paralives looks the way it does, but connections get finicky, and the fastest route to a house you actually finish is a grid-aligned box you decorate afterwards.

The build keys worth learning first

Every binding here is rebindable in Settings → Key Bindings, and the list is read from the same data as our full controls page.

Action	Windows	macOS
Switch between Build and Live mode	`Tab`	Same
Draw a wall	`B`	Same
Toggle the grid	`G`	Same
Disable snapping	`Alt (hold)`	`Option (hold)`
Move an object vertically	`Shift (hold)`	Same
Sledgehammer — demolish	`K`	Same
Pipette — copy a swatch	`I`	Same
Copy a wall or floor swatch onto any recolourable item	`Alt + left-click (pipette selected)`	`Option + left-click (pipette selected)`
Toggle the advanced transform widget	`* (numpad)`	Same
Go up a floor	`Page Up`	Same
Go down a floor	`Page Down`	Same
Cycle wall visibility forward	`Home`	Same
Cycle wall visibility back	`End`	Same
Undo	`Ctrl + Z`	`Cmd + Z`

Two more are missing from the bindings list because they are modifiers rather than shortcuts: Shift while drawing a wall gives you half-grid steps, and Alt held during a drag suspends snapping for that one movement.

You flung something across the lot with the advanced widget

The advanced transform widget — * on the numpad, or Toggle advanced transform in an object's three-dot menu — replaces the normal handles with axis arrows, stretch boxes and rotation rings. It is how you lay a cushion flat or float a shelf, and it is also how a lamp ends up two lots away, because the arrows have no travel limit.

Ctrl + Z is the recovery. Undo works on widget moves, and it is worth pressing immediately rather than chasing the object down. If you have already saved and moved on, the honest answer is to reload the last save: we have not found a reliable way to reselect an object that has left the lot.

The studio's own known-issues list for patch 0.1.2 says items moved or rotated with the advanced widget may not stay where you put them after a reload, with no fix timeline given. Treat widget-placed decor as the last thing you do before saving, and check it again after the next load.

What we could not confirm

These come up constantly and we could not verify an answer in the current build. Rather than round them off into advice, here they are as open questions.

Whether a full wall can sit directly on top of a half wall as a single assembly. We found no method and no statement from the studio either way.
Whether separators affect Para pathfinding and autonomy the way physical walls do, or only visual and painting zones. Several guides assert the former without showing it.
Whether an object pushed outside the lot boundary can be reselected without undoing or reloading.
Whether ceiling height can be set per room independently of wall height, beyond what the per-wall arrow already does.

Paralives rooms and build mode FAQ

Why can't I place floors in Paralives?: Because flooring is a paint surface, not something an enclosed room generates. Open the Paint category in build mode, choose Flooring, and click inside the room. If part of the room still shows bare ground, that part is a separate zone — a separator, a platform edge or a stair cut-out — and has to be painted on its own.
How do I turn a lot into a house in Paralives?: Draw the full wall outline first, shorten those walls so the ground storey becomes a foundation, move up a floor and build the house on top, then paint floors and walls, then add doors, windows, stairs and roof. The order matters because a placed room cannot be moved afterwards.
How do I make the game see two separate rooms?: Put a separator across the space. It draws like a wall from the wall tools and then becomes invisible, and the game treats each side as its own zone for floor materials, wall paint and floor height. You can also convert an existing wall or fence into a separator from its three-dot menu.
Where is the foundation button in Paralives?: There is no foundation button. A Paralives developer described the studio's method on the Steam forums: build a first floor, select one of its walls, drag the height arrow down so the storey is short, and treat that squat storey as the foundation. Stairs then snap to the raised edge.
Why is there a gap under my floor?: A raised platform is a floor at height, not a solid block, so the ground under it stays open. Ring the raised section with short walls and paint them separately if you want it to read as a foundation; leave separators there if you want a deck that looks like it floats.
Should I build with the grid on or off in Paralives?: On, until the shell is up. The grid keeps opposite walls aligned and furniture predictable; press G to drop it when you need a curve, an angle or a connection to an off-grid house. It is a per-moment choice, not a mode you pick once.

Keep going

Paralives rooms, floors and the foundation button that isn't there

Walls first, then height, then paint

Which page do you actually want?

How to raise a foundation

How to lay a floor

Walls that won't connect

Full first-house tutorial

Ten habits that do not transfer

The order the game wants

Get a lot you are allowed to edit

Change three settings before the first wall

Draw the whole footprint first

Turn the ground floor into the foundation

Cut the interior into zones

Paint every surface, one zone at a time

Then doors, windows, stairs and roof

What Paralives counts as a room

Half walls, full walls, and stacking them

The gap under a raised floor

Do you build with the grid or without it?

Reasons to keep it on

Reasons to turn it off

The build keys worth learning first

You flung something across the lot with the advanced widget

What we could not confirm

Paralives rooms and build mode FAQ

Next in the build cluster

Build a whole town

15 build mode tips

Every control and hotkey

Stairs that snap

Build mode hub