I Made Rookwood School In The Sims

Update November 2020: Thanks to a new free patch, The Sims 4 now has the ability to build platforms! If you have this build in your game you should now be able to fix the school hall so that it actually has a real stage.

Hello friends! I don’t know how many of you are fans of the Sims, but I assume if you’re reading this that you’re probably a fan of Scarlet and Ivy. If you’re completely new here – Scarlet and Ivy is my series of 1930s mystery books, about twins who attend the very creepy Rookwood School.

So for some bizarre reason I decided to recreate the whole of Rookwood School in the Sims 4. This was a much bigger task than I thought, because the school is absolutely huge! I actually had to shrink it down a fair bit to even fit it on the biggest lot in my game. But I squeezed in as much as I possibly could. In this blog, I’ve taken a bunch of suitable spooky screenshots on a dark and snowy night…

It was so much fun to create this. In some ways it was strange, because it is so close to my imagination and yet of course can’t be exactly the same because of the limitations of the Sims – for example, it’s a little hard to build proper stables when horses and straw don’t exist in the game… and they probably wouldn’t be so close to the swimming pool in reality.

Being able to “walk” around a place that I created in my imagination is such a bizarre feeling. But I actually think it could be really useful. I’ve been working on building the main character’s house from my new series (ssh, it’s a secret) and it’s really helping me to picture how everything fits together. If you’re a writer and you own the game, I would definitely recommend trying to build some of your story locations.

I won’t give everything away, because I’m hoping that some of you guys will download the building and take a look around for yourselves… I have included scenes from different parts of the books because I wanted to include some iconic features – which does mean that this doesn’t particularly match up with any exact part of the timeline. But it should be fun to explore and look for the tiny details that I’ve hidden. Can you spot where the twins sleep, or Ariadne, or Ebony? Can you find the secret staircase to the basement? How about the skeleton in the closet?

Maybe you could even make or download some Scarlet and Ivy Sims and act out the books yourself! In fact, it was finding that fans had created Sims of my characters on the gallery that inspired me to make the school in the first place.

For those who know how to Sim – here is the link to the school on the Gallery.

Sims info: I used the bb.moveobjects cheat code (you may need to put this on as well) and some debug items, but no Custom Content. I own quite a lot of expansion packs, so you may not be able to view all items unless you also own them. If you want to play on the lot, you also might need to use a cheat code to get your Sims enough money to purchase it – it costs a whopping 803,853 simoleons!

I hope you guys will enjoy taking a look around Rookwood if you’re able to download it – and if not, that you can at least take a peek at these screenshots and see how they match up to your imagination.

Let me know what you think in the comments. Much love, lovely readers!