Summary
It’s easy to get so caught up with building houses inThe Sims 4that you forget to build the rest of your neighborhood. Bars, restaurants, clubs, gyms, and other establishments are just the tip of the iceberg. However, it’s not easy to create a space that doesn’t feel like a bigger house.
Public spaces follow different design rules than private residences, for both aesthetic and practical reasons. There just isn’t as much custom content on the internet for community lots as there is for homes, but what’s there is amazing. Here’s some of the best custom content for your businesses and public buildings.
8Shop Menu Board Set
EA has only provided a handful of chalkboardsfor your storefronts, and they all kind of look the same. It’s also almost impossible to find the one you want, as the signs from EA are all either limited to a narrow focus or have weird embellishments. This collection by samtuse963 gives you a nice set of basic signs with a variety of swatches.
There’s no shortage of products that you can showcase with these signs. Food is an obvious first choice, and you can find a wide range of different treats, such as waffles and ice cream in the signs' beautiful art. There’s also jewelry and flower displays, which are perfect for worlds like Tartosa.
7Bookstore Set
Bookstores and libraries are always a fun space for simmers to build, with thousands of players posting their creations on the EA Gallery and social media. That being said, not many of the EA bookshelves have the right look for a public space, with most of them being too “homey”.
There are plenty of bookshelves for your spaces in this set, but they’re far from the only thing you’ll find. Also available for download are the eerily familiar wooden chairs and tables you see in just about every library on the planet, along with stacks of books featuring real-world cover art.
6Uglify Your Town
Let’s face it, Sim neighborhoods often look too pristine to be real. Streets are free of garbage, walls lack any sort of graffiti, and almost everything is sparkling clean. Out in the real world, this sort of perfection is unattainable unless you happen to live in an affluent neighborhood.
If you’re hoping to add a dash of gritty realism to your game, the Uglify Your Town set from Around The Sims 4 is a great start. This set comes with plenty of graffiti-covered furniture, but that’s not all. Cigarette butts, flickering streetlamps, used face masks, and random shipping pallets are all here to decorate your neighborhood.
5Grocery Store Set
Unlike previous installments in the series, The Sims 4 doesn’t feature grocery shopping in its base game. All ingredients are either grown in your garden or caught using the Fishing skill, which has upset many simmers who want more realism in their Sims 4 experience. As such, plenty of mods have been created to add grocery stores to the game.
If you’re looking for a solid collection of custom content to create a realistic-looking grocery store in your Sims 4 neighborhood, user Severinka has made several shelves and grocery items for you to download. The set leans more on the alpha side in terms of aesthetics, but Maxis-match simmers have plenty of options here as well.
4Modular Awning Set
It’s common for shops and restaurants in large cities to have large awnings on their exterior, but the awnings offered by EA are more than a little disappointing. They only cover a small area, and there isn’t an easy workaround if you want to make them appear larger. Luckily, custom content creators have filled this void.
These awnings are perfectfor urbanized worldssuch as San Myshuno, but you can make them work for just about any neighborhood. You can adjust the length of your awnings to suit your needs, as well as whether you want lighting or not. With over 30 options to choose from, you can’t go wrong.
3Ratatouille Restaurant
It’s hard to find creators who specialize in high-quality alpha content when it comes to build mode objects. Many creators just slap a poorly edited photorealistic texture on an object and call it a day, which can be a source of endless frustration. Fortunately, Syboulette is here to be a ray of hope in these trying times.
The Ratatouille restaurant set provides everything you need to create your own fine dining establishment in The Sims 4. Certain objects require the Dine Out DLC to work properly, but much of the furniture and clutter items are base game compatible. From appliances to clutter items, no detail is left untouched.
2Private School CC Pack
The High School Years DLC finally gave simmers the ability to build functional schools for their Sims, but the build objects that came with it left a lot to be desired. Schools in real life follow a variety of different architectural styles, even if there are similarities they all tend to share in their interior design.
If you have Discover University or boarding school mods installed, you’re able to use the bedroom furniture in this set to build student dorms. The posters that come with this pack are also impressive, featuring decor you can place in your dorms as well as promotional artfor student clubs.
1Greasy Goods Diner Kit
The Dine Out DLC gave players the ability to build their own dining establishments, but there’s a sort of classiness to most of the EA items that greatly limits their use. Sometimes you just want some cheap, greasy food that you order at a counter without any added fanfare.
If you want to build your own fast food franchise in The Sims 4, look no further than the Greasy Goods Diner Pack from littledica. The color scheme and menu boards resemble, but are legally distinct, from some of your favorite fast food joints in real life. You even get the newfangled order kiosks included for free!
