Normally, you can't put items on top of other items in a base. Oh sure, you can put some bottles on top of a desk or maybe a phone or some other small item, but nothing big like your secret entrance. You can't even put something as big as a desk on top of a desk!
Why would you want to? Well if you could put two desks together and put a larger item on top of it, you could get more creative with your base designs by putting some things higher than they'd normally be. After all, you can't get that creative if everything is always on the floor.
However, by using a trick called "magic desks" you can change the behavior of certain desks to make them able to take larger items like… other desks. But not just those. Put enough together and you make a platform of desks that can be used to place large items. The cool part is that you can delete or drag the desks to another room and the item you placed will stay up there! The design possibilities are endless with this concept.
It can take a LONG time to get everything placed properly and you can't move the item once it's floating without removing the float aspect. You have to get it all right the first time or risk having to re-pile the magic desks. BUT! It's worth it as you'll soon see 🙂
 A magic desk in action |
 Placing something big with multiple desks |
 Floating plant! |
Now that I've convinced you that you must have magic desks!!!!, how do you do it?
There's a pinned thread on the official boards that explain exactly how to do this with tons of screen captures, examples of what can be done, and even a video that someone posted to Youtube that show off the wonder of magic desks. The only problem is that even with all the instruction and all the help, I couldn't get it to work. Once I figured it out, I decided to post this guide because I felt like there needed to be a consolidated source of pictures, video, and tips. So here we go:
Making the Desk
There's a few different ways and some different instructions for doing so, but here's the simplest that I've found.-
Find out which side of your base faces east. To do this, first check your navigation before you click to edit the base. You need to know this because magic desks can lose their "magic" if you exit the base or log out. Preventing this requires that the drawers of the desk face east once you've finally made one.
Step 1: Find east -
There are actually several different desks that you can do this with, but the one I got to work first was the Rustic Flattop Desk so it's the one I'll recommend. Select one from the "Desks" tab and place it somewhere (doesn't matter where and doesn't matter what direction yet).
Step 2: Place desk -
Step 3: Spin the sucker! (Video: 4.2Mb)I haven't done extensive testing on the precise number of turns, but I'll go with what worked for me. The original instructions say you have to place it next to another desk, move it directly on another, spin it four times then pick it up and do it again. Someone said that if you just spin it at least 25 times, it will work just as well (without needing special placement or other desks to work from).
To do it correctly, left click and hold to pick the desk up. Then click the right mouse button 25+ times and then let go of the left button. For best results, make sure the final spin has the desk drawers facing east. It doesn't really matter how many times you spin it, just make sure that you do it at least 25 and have it face east when you're done.
That's it! To test it, try putting another desk directly on top of it (they have to be exactly lined up before the box will turn blue showing you that it worked). Now the key here is that the desk that allows another desk to be placed on top of it is the magic desk (not the one that goes on top). Make a whole bunch of these and use them to stack things up wherever you want!
Tips
- Make a bunch of the desks and keep them somewhere. When you're done stacking, don't delete or sell them, just move them to another room so you can use them again. Once they're magic, they'll stay magic as long as you don't turn them from the east
- Always raise the floor first. Each level of floor is worth about one and a half desks of height so if you're trying to get something up high, raise the floor first to save you time.
- When first making the desks, select the desk from the menu and set it down in the room. Selecting the desk and spinning it before placing it down will not work.
- To float something, you need enough desks to cover the entire bottom of the floated item. It sucks, but there you have it. That means it will take a lot of desks to float something big and even more if you need to make multiple stacks.
- To make counting easier, I just counted the number of full rotations rather than each individual turn. So instead of 25 spins (which I always lost count with), I would make 7 full rotations (28 turns).
Be careful when dragging the desks out from under the item! If you get too over-zealous, you might accidentally drag away your floated item making for a very unhappy time rebuilding your desk pile only to put the item back. It would be easier to just drag them to somewhere else in the same room, but for the ones directly under the floated object, you can't do that. You have to drag them to another room.
One tips is to leave a bunch of stuff lying around on the floor in the room so there's no legal place to drop your floated object. If you do that, then even if you accidentally click and drag your floated object, you can let it go and it won't move
My Results
You didn't think I was going to end this without showing off my stuff did you :)?
