The screenshots for this guide were taken at different times and are from different builds, as I was playtesting my guide to make sure my strategy is effective. So they may not always match the text and are simply there for demonstration purposes.

When you start up Sandbox mode and click Play, you are given two options. The one you need is Edit Property, every time you play! This will give you the full Sandbox mode interface. The Play/Continue button above it is intended for custom job creators to test their properties - it gives you only the standard Story mode interface. While it is possible to build a property in Play mode, many of the powerful tools, and even some save options, are missing from it.

To fill the shortcut bar at the top of your screen with up to 9 shortcuts, simply right-click to bring up the interface, drag your mouse over a tool and press a number key on the keyboard. The highlighted tool will be transferred to the corresponding slot in the toolbar. You can repeat the process at any time to change the key binds.

Here’s toolbar setup that I find the easiest to use when building:
1. Hands. That’s where the Duplicate function is. It also makes a nice “cancel” button for the other tools.
2. Build (Wall). Its Options menu has a Change Style function, which applies a surface finish to All sides of the surface at once!
3. Delete Wall. Has two settings. You will never need to use the “Above Roof” setting if you make sure your Build tool is set to “Limited by roof” but it’s still there, in case you forget.
4. Flipper tool. Its most useful function is Change Style.
5. Surface Finish tool. Used to copy and select surface finishes. Drag a selection box over a surface, then cover all of it in a single click! Also applies paint.
6. Transform tool. Used for moving items and architectural elements. Also for resizing architectural elements.
7. Roofing. Lets you pre-select a roof style, and build it, but not edit - that’s a job for the Flipper tool.

The shortcut for Undo is Z. The one for Redo is Y. Currently, this is for Sandbox mode only, but a similar feature has been widely requested for Story mode as well.

The Build tool makes a good measuring tape. The ghostly green bricks have little green numbers above them, showing the measurement in metres and blocks:



The item preview on the right hand side of the Store interface has a square above it, labelled “i”. It stands for “information”, and clicking on it gives you the measurements of the item in centimetres!



As you can see, the right-hand image of an item in the Store also shows its model name and item type. Clicking on either of those will automatically use them as search terms! In the example below, you can search for either all “Vanamo” items or all sink cabinets, depending on what you click.

The Options menu for the Wall tool has two settings for the foundation. In this guide, I’m going to use the Outward setting, which will give us a foundation that is raised above ground level. Inward makes it level with the ground - useful when building a garage, a driveway, a porch or a wheelchair-accessible property. Here’s a comparison screenshot:

The first thing you should build in your house is what I like to think of as a “seed” - the beginnings of a room that will eventually become your hallway.

Press G to turn on Fly mode, go up in the air and pick the point you wish to build from. Bear in mind that, since it’s going to be a hallway, you will probably need to leave space for other rooms on both sides. Put the Build tool in Outward mode and build the “seed floor”. My experimentation has shown that 16 blocks by 9 blocks is a good size for it.

Next, build your first wall - the one that’s going to be the template for all the other walls in the house. Build it along one of the longer sides of your “seed floor”, so that it’s 16 blocks long. Build all your downstairs walls on the ground, not the floor, to ensure that you are not losing any floor area. Make it 14 blocks high, so that it’s 13 blocks high from the floor level.

Next, place the “ceiling bar” - a line of 7 blocks (1.4 metres) from the wall, showing where the Top of your staircase, and your ceiling, will be.

Here’s a screenshot of the end result:



As each in-game block is 20 cm, the wall is going to be 2.4 metres tall from floor to ceiling - the most commonly used ceiling height in real-life residential buildings. For larger, fancier houses you can make the floor or the ceiling bar longer and the wall higher, but reducing these measurements is probably a bad idea, as they seem to be the minimum.

Before buying your staircase, pick the “First step flat” setting for your “bottom”, for ease of placement. “Flat” is hard to resize, while with “Slanted” it’s difficult to figure out where the bottom will be. So it’s best to place the stairs first, and then choose a different option with the Flipper tool if you wish.

Start your staircase so that its top step is pressing against the “ceiling bar” at its back. Make it the same width as the “ceiling bar” and drag diagonally downwards until you reach the floor. Your character needs at least 5 blocks of space to be able to walk, so make the staircase at least 6 blocks wide if you want one handrail or 7 blocks wide if you plan to have two. A staircase that's 5 blocks wide is usable, if you are going for the claustrophobic feel.

The open-tread Knikknacks staircase is a little different - it’s top point is slightly higher than its top step. So when you place it, the top step will be one block below the “ceiling bar”. See the comparison screenshot:



Options:
- “Slanted” is very diagonal at the bottom, maximising the space underneath. The modernist design of the Potpourri staircase means it’s only available in Slanted - selecting any other option doesn’t change its appearance.
- “First step flat” is the design used in most homes, so it looks the most familiar.
- “Flat” looks like a right-angled triangle, so no space underneath. However, the bit under the stairs functions like a wall.

Now that your stairs and your first wall are in place, it’s time to expand your hallway. Extend the floor in any direction until it is the exact size and shape you want it to be.

Next, put in all the furniture pieces that need to stand on the floor! If something doesn’t fit, extend it some more.

Once you are happy with the size of the room and the way everything fits, surround it with a “baby wall” - a border, 2 blocks high from the ground and 1 block high from the floor. If you are putting in one of those weird 2-legged hallway tables, make sure the “baby wall” behind it is 3 blocks high from the floor, or you wouldn’t be able to place it. Later, you will grow those walls to the height of the “template wall”.



Decide where you want to place your exterior door and your interior door(s). Place them on top of the “baby wall” first (see screenshot below), then delete the first row of blocks from underneath them and move the doors down onto the floor. They will be functional even before you build walls around them!



Options:
- Exterior doors in HF2 are 1.2 m, or 6 blocks wide for the standard ones, 1.6 m, or 8 blocks wide for the wide ones and 2.0 m, or 10 blocks wide for the doubles.
- Interior doors - 1.0 m or 5 blocks standard, 1.8 m 9 or blocks double.
- Door frames with no door have widths of 5, 8 and 9 blocks.

Take the furniture out of the hallway. Grow the walls to the size of the "template wall", including building around the doors you've placed before. Apply wall and floor finishes. Open the door and put the furniture back in the room. Put in windows where needed.

Build the rest of the downstairs using the method described above.

For the bathroom and the kitchen, skip the "baby wall" part - build full-height walls straight away, apply your finishes, then put the furniture in. Sinks, toilets and showers have minimum wall height requirements, while kitchens simply have a lot of cabinets to place against the wall.

Starting from the "ceiling bar" behind your staircase, build a wall down to the floor. Proceed to build a "box" of full-height walls around your staircase, enclosing it on all sides. You might find it easier if you change the style in the Build Wall options menu to something that contrasts with the rest of the downstairs walls, like in this picture:



Turn the Fly mode on. Starting at the "ceiling bar" and the top of the walls surrounding your staircase, extend the downstairs ceiling/upstairs floor across the entire house. The end result should be an unbroken surface, with an opening where the staircase is.

Turn the Fly mode off again, go down the stairs and delete the walls at the front and back of the staircase. You may delete the side wall as well, or keep it.

Make a stair landing at the top of the stairs. Make at least 1 m. (5 blocks) of space horizontally between the top of the stairs and the door or wall in front of them. Extend the length of the landing to one or both sides to make an upstairs corridor. The width of the corridor and the landing should be the same throughout. Here’s an example:

Turning the Fly mode on and off as required, build the floorplan of the top floor just like you did before - put down “baby walls” first, and only extend them to full height when you are happy with the layout. Once the rooms are built and furnished, put in the upstairs windows.

Turn the Fly mode on. With the roof on the default, Hip setting, stretch it from a corner across the entire building, making sure there’s No overhang.

Fly through the roof, so that you are underneath it, to see what the ceiling looks like. Fly back up again and edit the roof with the Flipper tool to experiment with different roof styles, until you find the one you like best.

Once you have picked your roof style, use the Transform tool in Resize mode to give your roof an even overhang on all sides. Two clicks of the horizontal arrow seem to be the optimum, like in this picture:



Make sure your Build tool is set to “Limited by Roof”. Unless you are making an attic, extend your upstairs walls all the way up to the roof.

Options: The different roof styles are as follows:
- “Hip”. The default style, and the easiest to work with. The pitch is best left at the default setting of 6, although anything from 4 to 10 doesn’t look too ridiculous. Doesn’t seem to be a good style for attics - a storage loft at most - as it has 4 sloping surfaces.
- “Gable”. With only 2 sloping surfaces, this is a good style for attics. The pitch may be anything from 1 (flat) to 21 (A-frame lodge).
- “Half-hip”. Gable at the front and Hip at the back. Unfortunately, the roof decides for itself where the Gable side should be, always on the longer side of the building, so you might need to rotate it.
- “Sloped”. One half of a Gable. Go ahead and stretch it over the entire building if you are feeling slightly mad. Sensible people use these for porches or dormer windows. Although Hip or Gable roofs are more commonly used for those.
- “Hip corner”. A Hip roof for a corner. See Sloped description above for usage.

That’s it! You’ve built your house. Now you can finish furnishing and decorating it, stick a little roof above the door and make a porch, set your Wall tool to the Inward setting and proceed to build a garage or a driveway... The only limitation is your imagination!

Sometimes your plot of land can feel a bit... I don’t know, flat, I guess. Thankfully, there are tools that will give your plot the depth and volume it needs. Warning - you are going to use the Z key a lot!

As you can see on the screenshot below, it has 4 modes. As I don’t remember what they are called, I will give them superhero-sounding names.



“The Hill Raiser”
The first mode from the left. Hills are supposed to be big, so there’s no real point in using a radius of less than 1.0, unless you are making smaller hills to merge with the big one. You might want to use the paint tool on it before raising, to see what you are doing a bit better. Here’s a sand-painted hill with a radius of 1.0 and an elevation of 0.10:



By picking the square setting, you can make a cuboid hill, for a kind of plateau for your castle/lighthouse to stand on:



When on the square setting, there is no radius. Instead you draw a square of the size you need before clicking:



The higher the intensity, the more your hill will grow in a single click. The max intensity is 1.0 for a reason - on the square setting, it will make your plateau grow by 1 metre in one click:



“The Hole Digger”
The second mode from the left. The same as the Hill Raiser, but instead of building, it digs. Can be used in an emergency to cancel out mishaps with the previous tool.
Hopefully, we will get a pond-making tool someday, because this looks like it would make a great one!



“The Smoother”
The third mode from the left. It’s best to set the radius to less than the radius of your hill, and use it to smooth the angular bits.

“The Plateau-nic”
This one, the fourth mode from the left. is easy. Find the ground level you wish to attain, press Q to set it, drag to select the area of effect. Then click and watch the selected area rise to that level! Here’s an example of the end result, painted for prettiness:



The most effective use sequence for these modes is as follows:

1. If you wish to build on your raised land (such as a lighthouse or a castle), pick the square mode. If you wish to have hills, pick the round one. So the square is best used Before building, while the round is best used when the house is already built, although this is up to you, of course.

2. Experiment with “The Hill Raiser” and “The Hole Digger” until you find the radius and height you need.

3. Experiment with different radiuses (or is it “radii”?) for “The Plateau-nic”. Pick the desired height on the hill you’ve just built and raise as much land as you need to that height. You may find it useful to build a temporary fence around the area you wish to raise.

4. Finish off with “The Smoother”. If you have round hills, it can smooth the top, making it less jagged and spiky. If you have a square plateau, it will make the walls less vertical. In other words, it makes everything less angular.

Changes the surface of the ground. Has 4 modes - grass, sand, rocky soil and slightly less rocky soil. The last 3 modes are grassless, so no need to use the Grass Editor on those.

Has 3 modes - Wild, with long grass and poppies; Tidy, with long grass and no poppies; and No Grass, which removes the grass, but keeps the land colour.

Easy to use. Simply draw a square in the ground, go back to the hand tool, turn the Fly mode on, equip the Build tool and go into the hole. Then proceed to build around the inner edges of the hole as normal. Here, I've built a well, 12 blocks deep:



As you can see from the screenshot below, the hole is 10 metres/50 blocks deep - enough for not only a basement, but for several underground levels:



If you go too deep, you will glitch out and end up back where you started, by the side of the hole.

That's all folks! Happy building!