InZoi Tips: 10 Things To Know Before You Play

InZoi is finally here in Steam Early Access, poised to give The Sims franchise its first real competition in the life sim genre. But it's going up against a game, The Sims 4, which has been around for more than a decade and has dozens of DLC packages and game updates to show for it. It would be a rough comparison even if InZoi were coming out in 1.0 shape. As it is, InZoi is different enough from The Sims that it'll take a little time to get used to the many ways that InZoi changes up the formula.

But InZoi is in Early Access, and that actually does mean something. This is not really a fully fleshed-out game yet, and it's not even on the level of a vanilla release of a new iteration of The Sims. Instead, InZoi is mostly just the framework for other stuff that will come later. As it exists today, InZoi is the epitome of "a mile wide and an inch deep," and it's important to remember that as you navigate InZoi's world.

But you don't have to struggle with that on your own. We've assembled here a list of tips that will help you get started with your InZoi endeavors so you can spend a little bit less time doing trial and error experimentation and a little more time doing whatever it is you really want to do. So let's dive in.

The economy in this game is not balanced well right now, and so you should not feel bad about using the money cheat button in the Psicat guide menu. That cheat is an essential feature right now, because it's no fun having to scramble to figure out how to make money when you're broke and faced with impossible bills right from the start.

While it has nowhere near the depth of The Sims 4 right now, InZoi is built to be a more granular and personal experience, and part of that effort involves a fundamental difference in its control scheme. In The Sims, you'd use your WASD keys to control the camera, but in InZoi you use those keys to manually control your Zois. That is, you can directly walk your characters around.

It's a weird thing when you're in the standard isometric view--when I first started playing InZoi, I was constantly canceling out my queued up actions by trying to move the camera using WASD. But if you hit Tab, you'll switch to an over-the-shoulder view that works perfectly with that control scheme for when you just want to walk around town a bit, and doing so adds a lot to InZoi's immersive qualities.

In The Sims, garbage only accumulates in your home when you make a mess. In InZoi, by contrast, your home will constantly accumulate dust that has to be cleaned pretty much daily using a broom, mop, or vacuum cleaner. Alternatively, you can hire a cleaning service using the Pocket Market app on your phone, but you can't get a scheduled or recurring service right now.

In InZoi, your needs don't simply exist as meters to be filled--they actually can have serious effects if they're low. For example, if you're very tired, you'll do everything worse. The food you cook will be lower in quality, the pictures you paint will suck and be worthless, and you'll probably electrocute yourself to death if you try to rob an ATM (pictured). So be sure to be awake and fed when you try to do anything important.

One of my favorite InZoi features is its scheduler, which lets you set whatever recurring activities you want to do each week. The problem with this feature, however, is that it automatically fills it with random activities when you create your Zois, and if you don't remove these things from the schedule, your Zoi will constantly try to go to these useless activities while ignoring any commands you give. So, adjusting your calendar to remove that stuff should be one of the first things you do.

My Zois will sometimes watch TV, but they never, ever turn it off afterward. And, for whatever reason, the TV programming in InZoi is just ten-second slideshows with music that loop over and over again, filling your home with obnoxious noises that never go away. So, be sure to turn off the TV when you notice a non-stop loop of chipmunk gibberish invading your earholes.

InZoi is full of really deep customization options, including some that you might not expect. For example, you have the ability to use build mode pretty much anywhere, so you can customize the look and feel of your city by putting a taco truck on every corner, or whatever else you may want to do. And if you go into the Edit City interface, you can customize even more aspects of the city, like how easy or hard it is to develop relationships with others, or whether everybody will be in a bad mood

For some strange reason, there are certain things that only one Zoi per family can do, like buy and drive a car, get the mail, or set permissions on doors. These permissions default to either the oldest Zoi in your family or, if they're all the same age, the one you made first.

If you don't have any skills but desperately want some, the best place to go is your local AR library, which is full of books that you can read to increase your skills. Since it's not always clear what actions will increase what skills, the library can make it easier to get started.

If you have neutral karma, you're actually missing out on lots of possible actions that are locked behind certain karma levels--it's basically like a light side/dark side meter. The worse your karma gets from being mean to people, the more negative actions you'll be able to do--folks with bad karma can start fights and commit crimes, and will generally be more autonomously rude.

On the flipside, having good karma makes it easier to get along with people by giving you more harmonious actions and giving you a more positive demeanor. So the karma system actually does matter.

Bookmark this guide as we'll be adding more to it as we discover more about InZoi and it continues to change shape throughout its early-access period.