Game guide:Fixing the apartment height data glitch

Contrary to popular belief, it is completely possible and perfectly safe to build an apartment on a lot with uneven terrain, including a beach lot, and to give apartments basements. The game will not yell at you nor will it cause corruption. The "severely corrupted terrain" that the readme warns about is actually a glitch with the height data that can easily be fixed. This guide explains what that glitch is and how to fix it.

Major credits to Mootilda at ModTheSims for taking the time to look into this.

Background
Understanding the glitch requires a bit of knowledge on how apartments function. A fully functioning occupied apartment isn't actually one lot, but could be as many as five! When an apartment is first created, either by placing it from the Lots bin, or by changing the zoning with a cheat, a template, referred to by the game as an "apartment base lot" is created. This is the lot that loads when you enter an unoccupied apartment building.

When you move a family into an apartment, the game uses the Base to generate an identical, though invisible, copy of the lot in the same exact position as the base. This is how the game allows multiple households to live in one apartment building, and is called an "apartment sublot". This Sublot is linked directly to the Base, and when you click on the Base in the neighborhood, you see a list of existing Sublots, and the families associated with each one; the family you select determines what Sublot to load.

Multiple Sublots seem to be able to share data with each other, as well as the base, though not everything is shared. Specifically, they share data for townie neighbors, the playable families living in the building, and the furnishings within the apartments. They do not seem to share data for the communal areas though, hence why items placed there with cheats will only be seen in that one Sublot.

The Glitch
As previously mentioned, the readme's claim that apartments will be severely corrupted on uneven terrain is unfounded. The game will let you create an apartment on such a lot, and the Base lot is initialized without trouble. However, when you move a family into the apartment, the height data from the Base is not copied to the Sublot properly. As a result, the entire lot will appear to be several stories too low, with the surrounding lots up on hills, and, if it's a beach lot, the water floating in the air.

Solutions
There are two known ways to correct this glitch. Note that this must be done for each family moved into the apartment (ie. each generated Sublot).

First Method
If you have a fully patched version of Apartment Life (or Mansion and Garden Stuff), this glitch can easily be fixed in-game.

After moving a family into the lot:
 * 1. Save and exit the lot.
 * 2. Open the Lots and Houses Bin
 * 3. With the hand tool, pick up the apartment and put it back down; since moving the Base also moves the Sublots, this forces them to rebuild the height data, which works correctly.

Second Method
If you don't have a fully patched version of Apartment Life, or the game won't let you place the lot back in its original place, this glitch can also be fixed using SimPE.


 * 1. Open SimPE and load the neighborhood in question.
 * 2. Under "Lot Description", look for the name of the apartment building you're trying to correct.
 * 3. Select the copy of the lot without a number on the end (this is the base).
 * 4. In the Lot Description Editor, find the "Z:" field and write down the value that it contains.
 * 5. Compare this value to the "Z:" values in each sublot; if any sublots have a Z: value other than the base's value (the one you wrote down), replace its Z: value with that of the base.
 * 6. Save your changes and exit; the next time you load the lot in-game, the glitch should be fixed.