[jazzed-out jazz music]
Finally, a stuff pack that’s precisely what I always wanted!
The Sims 4 Tiny Living Stuff, where your sims are shrunk down to a fraction of the size
due to a mishap involving a baseball and a broken window, and then -- what?
-It's about tiny homes. -Aw man really?
I guess that makes more sense, sigh.
All right so yeah, the pack’s called Tiny Living Stuff, but instead of awesome shrunken
adventures, it’s all about living in a relatively undersized home.
It costs $10 and is the sixteenth Sims 4 stuff pack to date good grief what the balls.
And I gotta say, even though I’d be way more into a pack about miniaturized sims,
I was still intrigued by Tiny Living here.
Because yeah man, I’ve been rather tiny-curious for years now, immediately sucked into all
the YouTube channels and reality shows focusing on the Tiny House Movement.
And the whole idea is to make the most out of a small space, rejecting the concept of
buying a multi-thousand square foot home.
I myself live in a house that’s about 800 square feet or 74 square meters, and while
objectively not “tiny,” it’s certainly a lot smaller than I could’ve chosen and
that was very much on purpose.
I’ve enjoyed the challenge of trying to make the most of the space I have without
piling a million things on top of each other, so the chance to do so virtually in
the The Sims 4 is absolutely my cup of nitro cold brewed coffee.
The first thing you’re greeted with on installing Tiny Living Stuff
is a message about living in a tiny house and stuff.
A pre-made tiny home has been provided to plop down anywhere you like, acting as an
example of what exactly constitutes a tiny home in The Sims 4 universe.
In case you’re unaware, a real life tiny house is generally considered to be one under
37 square meters or 400 square feet.
This example home in The Sims 4 is composed of 32 tiles, and if we assume each tile is
a square meter, then we’ve got 32 square meters or 350 square feet, a bit below that
of a tiny house IRL.
However, Tiny Living Stuff lays out three different tiers of tiny house, each with its
own perks and requirements.
The smallest being the Tier 1 “Micro Home” at up to 32 tiles in size, Tier 2 is a “Tiny
Home” at up to 64 tiles, and Tier 3 is a “Small Home” at up to 100 tiles.
The most fascinating aspect of these tiered home sizes is that when you meet the requirements
on a lot designed as a Residential Tiny Home,
you’re provided a number of generous rewards for living there.
Things separate from lot traits, like faster learning, greater comfort, happier sims, healthier
plants, and better relationships.
So the less you do with doing more, the more you’re rewarded for doing more with less!
Er, by that I mean that, as of now, there’s incentives to go small and a kind of odd punishment
for having a huge house.
Makes me wonder if they’ll balance it out with a mansion-focused pack in the future.
Heck they could even call it The Sims 4 Livin’ Large, I’d be down with that.
Anyway yeah, this is a stuff pack packed with stuff so let’s unpack it and stuff!
First is an allotment of hair, accessories, and clothing for pretty much everyone this
time around, including the younginz.
Fitting right in with the overall “hygge” theme of living in a warm little cozy home,
there’s a bunch of warm, cozy attire.
Regardless of how much I want some of those sweaters for real though, that’s just the
garb and garment goods.
Let’s get onto the main event, kicking off with an assortment of single-tile desks and
tables, suitable for all manner of desking and tabling.
Followed by a few decorative yet functional items, including a lamp, readable books, and
lighttable candles in a cluttered tray.
Three chesty wardrobe shelving type things for holding various objects and clothing.
A patterned rug for plopping down in the middle of the backyard or wherever.
A pretty standard toilet and a sink that handily works off-the-grid.
Two TVs, one standing and one that attaches to a wall, each pulling quadruple duty by
also acting as a display shelf, a bookcase, and a stereo.
Various other wall-mountable items are here too, including a mirror, a door, two shelves
of random thingies, four potted plants strung together, and a plant-inspired piece of artwork.
Three sets of hanging light bulbs, each with their own varying degrees of droopiness.
An ottoman, that isn’t an ottoman I guess, since it’s a pouffe?
Whatever it is cats love it.
There’s also a standard bed and a standard loveseat.
As well as this lamp that should provide storage space according to its description, yet it’s
totally unusable as such. It’s just a lamp.
Seriously, why tout its supposed dual purpose as a shelf
and then make it so you can’t set anything on it?
At least it makes for decent kindling, so I guess it does serve a second purpose after all.
And finally, you also get three new chairs, although two of them are slightly confusing at first.
This dining chair doesn’t actually function with the new dining table.
For that you have to use these high chairs, and once I realized that it was pretty awesome,
letting me really cram in a buncha seating in a super small space.
Finally, the headlining new items of the Tiny Living pack are Murphy Beds,
with and without a built-in loveseat.
And at first this seems pretty useful, since you can fold them away when not in use and
those wardrobe shelving units attach to the sides for a clean-looking modular design.
But really, Murphy Beds are... confusing.
While I applaud the addition of new sleepytime snuggle zones, the usage of them in this pack
doesn’t make much practical sense.
For one, they require the exact same 3x2 tile floor space as a normal bed.
You get a loveseat on one of them, sure, but it still leaves tiles of unusable space underneath.
And since sims can’t get into bed from the front, only the sides, you need another set
of tiles off to the left and right at least half a tile wide.
The worst part though is this stupid animation that plays out far too often, where sims try
to pull down the bed then fail in spectacular fashion.
It’d be fine if it happened one out of every 20 times or something, but nope, sims fail
like every 3 or 4 times you open the dumb thing.
[bed fails, sim gets owned]
Making this worse is the fact that this far-too-frequent animation
comes with an unusually high risk of killing your sims!
bed fails, sim dies]
Now, okay, I’m all for new ways to take
out bothersome sims, that’s just good times.
But “Death by Murphy Bed” seems a bit silly, and again, it’s tied to an unskippable
animation that happens rather often.
Yes, there are now bed upgrade options in the game, accomplishing things like increasing
comfort and preventing it from getting stuck.
So you can alleviate the issue but still, I’d rather it wasn’t so prevalent to begin with.
And in my opinion, these repetitive slapstick failure animations
stopped being cute like fifteen packs ago.
So yeah, can’t say I’ll be using Murphy Beds in my tiny builds going forward, since
the way they work is annoying and their inclusion in this particular pack
is questionable in the first place.
Why not add them in the Discover University pack, that would’ve made a ton more sense
in my book, more so than a pack about itty bitty 32-tile houses.
I really think bunk beds would’ve been an ideal addition to the Tiny Living pack instead,
seeing as bunk beds actually do free up room, providing two beds in a single 3x1 space.
For that matter though, why not add better loft options?
Lofts are a staple of tiny home designs, and making them in The Sims 4 means adding a second
story with a cumbersome full-sized staircase.
Ladders are used all the time in real life tiny homes,
but nope, nowhere to be found in Tiny Living.
Even spiral staircases would be more space-efficient but those still aren’t a thing either.
For that matter, why not add steeper, narrower normal stairs?
Or at least provide some storage options underneath them, which again, is something that you see
all the time in actual tiny houses.
Not that it matters too much I suppose, since sims all have an infinite household inventory
that hides as many items as you like within a magic unseen void, hrm.
Still, while I’m on the topic of things I wish were included instead of murphy beds,
why not convertible futons or pull out sofa beds?
Under-the-counter mini fridges or in-wall ovens and microwaves?
How about portable induction cooktops?
Or over-the-sink shelf units and other kinds of stackable knickknack storage things?
Heck, composting toilets, solar power, and rain catchers would’ve been nice, seeing
as we’ve already got off-the-grid lots.
Instead we get cumbersomely large homicidal beds
and storage lamps that don’t store anything.
At least they took the time to add Baby Yoda to the game, so I guess that means it all
evens out in the end, right?
Heh, ahh now I’m just being grumpy, when in reality Tiny Living
is not the worst stuff pack by any means.
In fact, I think it’s one of the better ones for my playstyle.
It’s just that this daggone game’s been around for almost six years now, and after
sixteen stuff packs, I’m more than a bit fatigued.
There are a number of disappointing aspects to Tiny Living Stuff, no bones about it, and
I know they’ve could’ve added just a bit more in terms of useful objects and quality
of life improvements.
But they didn’t, and that’s just kinda how it goes, we all know that.
Still, I’ll personally be using a number of the items added here going forward, along
with building more tiny houses for the challenge it provides and the rewards it unlocks, so
you can glean from that what you will.
[gratuitous fiery sim death]
And if you enjoyed this look at the Tiny Living Stuff pack, then maybe check out my let’s
play that I did over on my other channel from what I was just playing this and getting my
thoughts together about the pack in the first place.
Or just stick around, there’s more videos coming up every week on this channel.
And as always, thank you for watching LGR!