Top tips for building the perfect home in Paralives

Although there are plenty of vacant homes that your Paras can buy right away to help them get a new lease of life in Melino as you play ParalivesIf you are more of a builder in life sim games, then you will be happy to know that there are limitless possibilities to build as well.

Grab one of the vacant lots around Melino (or even the other completely empty world, if you're feeling brave), enter Build Mode, and follow along with our handful of tips to help you master building in Paralives so your paras can enjoy their extravagant new homes.

Look up actual floor plans

Find a house you like IRL and then build

If you're aiming for realism in your Paralives builds, the best way to achieve that feeling is to model the builds you create from real floor plans from real homes. Load up a real estate site and look around, find the feel you want to give the game with this build and keep that in mind when you click back into build mode.

Real buildings can be fun in ways you wouldn't expect when building in Paralives. Homes have fewer windows than you might prepare to place, or hallways longer or narrower than you cut out with the wall tool, and so on. Plus, who doesn't want a chance to make their dream home in a game like this?

Use wall separators when painting

Create more unique looks with mixed walls

If you're building a home from scratch, then you'll want to pay attention to detail when creating your dream home in Paralives. We've all built the big rectangle house once or twice when we were younger, but there are many ways to separate spaces in life simulators now, even without making them separate rooms.

If you're trying to paint a wall in two colors, such as a living room that flows seamlessly into a kitchen in an open-plan home, you can use a wall divider to create space on the wall for each color. It saves you from having to manually paint every time you want to do something a little different on the same wall!

Manipulate the size of furniture

Most pieces can be stretched or shrunk

Whether you're using it to size your favorite bed up two sizes to fit a happy couple after the start of a relationship, shrink down a couch to make love seats, increase the height of a vaulted door to be a little grander, or if you just want to do something weird like create a massive toilet, the option is yours with the object manipulation tools in Paralives.

Most of the items will appear with blue arrows on the edges of the items, so just click to drag them in different directions and see what kind of things you can create for your Para's new home.

Use the purchase category that feels most comfortable

Sort by room or by object type

There is already an extensive furniture catalog in Paralives even though it was only out in early access when we publish this list, and it can be easy to get overwhelmed trying to find what you need. Thankfully, the game lets you sort the Buy catalog in a couple of ways.

Room view is useful when you are trying to create a specific room in the house at a time and need the typical amount of things nearby – beds and dressers in the bedroom category, refrigerators and stoves in the kitchen, and so on. Alternatively, you can sort by category instead to see items more at a glance, with more category breakdowns here to help you find something faster.

Hang artifact paintings as wall art

Who doesn't want free rare art?

Have you dug around town for buried treasure chests, come home from a long and tiring day and sifted through the dirt for rare paintings or statues? If you don't plan to donate them to the museum or Community Center packages in Melino, you can use your finds for free decor.

Paralives has dozens of real works of art as artifacts, hidden in chests all over the world. Seek some out and dig them up to see what kind of cool art you can find!

Trash can be your friend

Tastefully placed clutter makes rooms feel more surrounded

If you're trying to create a brand new home, or something you might see on a silver screen, it's easy enough to build clean, neat spaces with perfectly organized furniture and nothing out of place.

What feels more natural for family-based living, especially if you have little ones on the property, is to place some of the wide selection of clutter here, there and everywhere in the home. Pop cutlery and fruit bowls on the kitchen counter, accessories on dresser tops and so much more to give the atmosphere that Paras actually stay in the house you built.

Your favorite wall art, now as a rug

While we've already talked about the standard tools you can use to redesign the furniture you put into your Paras' homes, the advanced tools option gives you even more ways to customize the hundreds of items in the Buy catalog, potentially into something completely new.

The three colorful circles that appear on your selected object when you use the advanced tool in Paralives can move and shape the object in more ways than adjusting its size with the arrows. Rotate items to make them look completely incomplete in a home you live in, angle furniture to create more unique rooms inside, and let your imagination run wild even more in the Buy Catalog.

Plants and roads feel very natural

The areas you can buy around Melino to build on in Paralives are wonderful, but with so many different terrain tools available to you in build mode, why not get a little more creative with the area outside your new house as well?

The terrain tools in Paralives allow you to completely redo the natural areas of your owned plots. Add or remove grass and other greenery, place trees or flowers to bring life to the space, add a few water features here and there, and experiment with the property to physically shape it into your dreams.