If you only take three
Turn autosave off before you drag any wall. Build raised porches with the separator tool instead of hunting for a foundation tool. And copy a colour's hex code once, then paste it everywhere — it is the quickest way to make a house look designed rather than assembled.
The fifteen tips
In roughly the order you will need them: getting in, shaping the shell, then the finishing tools that are easy to miss.
- 1
Build mode has no loading screen
The house button in the bottom-left corner drops you into build mode instantly, and your Para's portrait takes you back to live mode. If you own several homes you can move the cursor between lots and edit them one after another without loading anything. Coming from other life sims, this is the habit that takes longest to unlearn.
House button in, portrait out. No loading either way.Watch at 0:55 - 2
You cannot move a room, but you can stretch it
Walls, rooms and whole houses cannot be repositioned on a lot in Early Access. What you can do is click and drag one wall of a room to push it out or pull it in. Save first: dragging walls is the single action most likely to glitch a room, and the reliable fix is quitting to the main menu without saving and loading the file again.
Drag a wall to resize. Save before you do.Watch at 1:11 - 3
The separator tool is the missing foundation tool
Foundations work backwards in Paralives. Place the walls for the room first, because you will not be able to move it later, then pick the separator to the right of the wall tool and trace over the shape. The separator marks an edge without building a wall, and that edge is what a staircase can snap to.
Separator first, then raise — the order matters.Watch at 2:50 - 4
Raise the floor with the blue arrow
Click inside the room and a blue arrow appears in the middle of the floor. Pull it up a few ticks for a porch, more for a full raised foundation. Remember to raise the rest of the house to the same height afterwards, or your front door opens into what looks like a basement.
A few ticks for a porch; match the rest of the house after.Watch at 2:39 - 5
Let the stairs snap, then fix them
Drag a staircase as close to the raised edge as you can and let it click into place. Perfect positioning by hand is wasted effort — once it snaps you can drag the side handles to match the stair width to the opening, and recolour it from the same menu.
Snap first, widen second.Watch at 3:22 - 6
What the finished porch looks like
Walls, separator, raised floor, snapped stairs, front door. Painting the foundation a different colour from the walls is what sells it as a foundation rather than a raised box — the paint tool treats the raised section separately.
Paint the raised section separately so it reads as a foundation.Watch at 1:27 - 7
Rotate floor planks after laying them
Place the flooring first, then select the room or the floor itself and use the direction sliders. Planks and stone snap to the new angle immediately. Trying to set the direction before placing does nothing, which is why the option is easy to miss.
Lay it, then rotate it. Not the other way round.Watch at 3:52 - 8
Blue highlight means identical height
Free-placing a window just above a bed is easy. Getting a second one to match is not — unless you clone the first instead of placing a new one. The clone keeps the exact height, and the blue highlight that appears while dragging confirms two objects sit on the same level.
Clone rather than re-place, and watch for the blue highlight.Watch at 4:05 - 9
Every shortcut you need is in the object menu
Select anything and the shortcut list appears: Esc to cancel, Alt for no snap, Shift to move vertically, hold and drag to rotate, Del to sell, X to rotate 90 degrees, and two 45-degree rotations. Toggle Advanced Widget at the bottom is the one to remember — it is how you lay a pillow flat, stretch an item along one axis or float a shelf.
Toggle Advanced Widget unlocks free stretching and tilting.Watch at 4:10 - 10
Assemble awkward roofs from pieces
Advanced roof tools are still on the roadmap, so roofs clip and occasionally snap at odd angles. Two things help: reload the save when a roof refuses to align, and build complicated shapes from several small roof sections joined together rather than one large piece.
Several small pieces beat one stubborn big one.Watch at 4:46 - 11
Not everything resizes
Nearly all furniture can be resized, recoloured with the colour wheel and given a pattern — but the limits are uneven. A counter run stretches to fit under a window while the sink inside it will not; curtains widen but refuse to reach the floor. Check an item before you design a wall around it.
Counters stretch. The sink in them does not.Watch at 5:20 - 12
Save the lot before you experiment
Zoom out from build mode, select the house and save the lot to your library with a name. It costs nothing and gives you a restore point that survives the glitched-room problem, which is worth doing before any big remodel.
A saved lot is the cheapest backup you have.Watch at 5:56 - 13
Upload to the Steam Workshop from the library
Open place a lot from the library and select one of your builds. The buttons along the bottom upload it to the Steam Workshop, set a custom thumbnail, edit its name and description, or delete it. Uploading takes seconds and the game confirms with a link to the Workshop page.
Thumbnail and description are set from the same panel.Watch at 6:12 - 14
Right-click a swatch to edit it
Custom colour swatches can be edited, duplicated and deleted by right-clicking them. Without this you end up with a swatch list full of near-identical shades, which makes finding the one you actually used harder every hour you build.
Right-click: edit, duplicate, delete.Watch at 6:40 - 15
Copy the colour code to repeat a shade
Open the colour wheel, highlight the colour code and press Ctrl+C, then paste it into the code box on any other item with Ctrl+V. This is how you get one wood tone or one metal finish repeated through a whole house. Swatches you pick also appear on duplicates of the same item, and the pipette (I) copies a colour straight off something you already placed.
Ctrl+C the code, Ctrl+V it anywhere else.Watch at 7:06
Common build mode questions
- How do you make a porch in Paralives?
- Place the walls for the porch shape, trace the outline with the separator tool, raise the floor with the blue arrow, then snap a staircase to the raised edge and widen it. There is no dedicated foundation or porch tool in Early Access 0.1.7c.
- Can you move a whole house in Paralives?
- Not yet. Rooms, walls and houses cannot be repositioned on a lot. Individual walls can be dragged to resize a room, and finished lots can be saved to the library and placed on a different lot.
- Why do my rooms glitch when I drag a wall?
- It is a known Early Access issue. Quitting to the main menu without saving and reloading the file clears it, which is exactly why autosave should be off while you build.
- How do you use the same colour on different objects?
- Open the colour wheel, copy the colour code with Ctrl+C and paste it into the code box on the other item with Ctrl+V. The pipette tool, hotkey I, copies a colour or an object you have already placed.
Related build guides
Full build mode tutorial
Seventeen illustrated steps from empty lot to saved house.
Build from a floor plan
Display a real blueprint on your lot and trace the walls over it.
Curved walls
Anchor points, what curves cannot take yet, and where curves pay off.
Move objects freely
Alt placement, vertical stacking with Shift and the advanced widget.
Build budget planner
Work out what your household can actually afford before you place it.