Walk-Out Basements

Hello again, right this way. Welcome to another guide on building. I was noticing before that many builders on this site tend to shy away from utilizing terrain tools much. So this is the first in a series of tutorials focused on some of the basic things you can do with terrain tools, with and without CFE. Today we are going to discuss walk-out basements. This guide will focus on starting with a flat lot, however, note that this same technique can easily be utilized for nonflat lots. Also do note that this guide will go over every task but I do not mean offense to those of you that do not require such exact amount of detail. Alright, so without further ado.

- First let’s start by building a foundation over where we imagine our house will be and where we imagine the walk-out basement will be. In this tutorial we will focus on a walk-out basement in the backyard, however, you can also build one in the frontyard or the sides, anything you can imagine really.
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- Next we are going to cut out some foundation where we will create the walk-out basement.
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- Next build 3 levels of stairs by just clicking on the ground. Note that throughout this entire tutorial CFE is set to true. You won’t see the outline of the stairs like you do when you normally build, you will just see a square, but that is okay, just click it and a small set of stairs will be built. Three of these small stairs are equivalent to 12 clicks, or the exact height of a wall. This is to ensure that the wall we build next will be at the same height as the foundation.  (Note two stairs are shown here, the third will be shown in the next image).
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- Next you can level off a small area of the ground.
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- After this level off a corner.
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- Finally level off the entire area.
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- You can now delete the stairs.
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- And lastly level off the area again.
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- Now we can build walls as we choose. These will become the rooms of the walk-out basement. Note that I left 1 tile of foundation on each side. You can leave more, but do not leave less as you need the 1 tile to cover the incline of the ground.
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- There you see it, a basic walk-out basement with foundation borders on all sides.
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- Now let’s imagine you wanted to create a natural border instead. To do so, delete a section of foundation as seen.
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- Then just utilize the smooth terrain tool to even out the area. Now you can see the walk-out basement with a natural wall border.
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- Now I am just going to color it in a bit so you can see better how it might look.
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- Lastly, throw in some walls so you might see how it looks with a house above.
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- I threw in two images here of one of my creations Maison Chouette, which features a walk-out basement just so you can see some of the things you can do with a walk-out basement.
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As always, thanks for reading ☺