Dormitory

A dormitory is a hybrid of a community lot and residential lot that can only be found in college neighborhoods. It allows the controlled Sims to live with Townies during their college days if they choose to. (There is always the option of renting a house on campus, but that is more costly). Each college has its own premade dormitories but the player is allowed to make their own (by use of the appropriate cheat code) or edit the pre-existing ones.

Each room door is able to be "claimed" by a single Sim, making that room his/hers and giving him/her the ability to restrict access to the room. You can tell which Sim has which room from the picture on the door. Townies that live on the lot with your Sims also claim rooms; you are given a slight head-start (about an hour of game time) to claim which rooms you want for your Sims. To maximize frame rate, rooms claimed by Townies appear empty unless one of your Sims walks into them (gives a more realistic effect anyway of "What's going on in there!?").

In addition to dorm rooms, most dormitories have a cafeteria and/or cooking facilities, restrooms with showers, at least one bookcase, items for building creativity and logic, recreational items, and areas for lounging or doing class assignments.

Advantages and disadvantages of dorm life

One large advantage to dorm life is that it's cheap. There's no cost to move into a dorm, and bills are low. While the cafeteria food isn't great, it's free, plentiful, and available at almost all hours. (Sims can still cook their own food in the kitchen whenever they wish.) The other main advantage is social. The Townies living in the dorm (often called "Dormies") are a ready-made pool of Sims for the playable Sims in the dorm to interact with and make friends with. It's also likely that some of them will be members of the secret society.

The disadvantages mostly center around the Dormies. They will do assignments very often, and frequently leave unfinished assignments on desks and cafeteria tables. They may have a tendency to do research, and do not always put the books away. If a bookcase is near a television set, chess table, computer, etc., seats in front of those items may be monopolzed by Dormies doing research. Dormies will not always shower when they need to, and will rarely, if ever, clean a toilet stall, shower, or bathroom sink without being influenced to clean. Also, tables will occasionally get "stuck", so that they're considered to be in use even though they're not being used, which can be annoying if a Sim is very hungry. Another disadvantage is that when a Sim throws a party or invites other Sims over, the guests often disappear into other Dormies' rooms for hours at a time, even if they have no relationships with the Dormies. Guests cannot be interacted with while in Dormies' rooms, nor can they be stopped from going there (as soon as they start walking toward a dorm room, there are no options to interact with them). This can make it difficult to throw a successful party at a dorm. It may also make joining a Greek house while on a dorm lot a challenge, since the members of the Greek house who arrive to "check out" the prospective member need to be socialized with, but often make themselves totally unavailable.