Frutiger Home Beginner Guide: First Hour Tips
Frutiger Home has no tutorial quest and no goals, which is exactly why the first ten minutes can feel aimless. This is the order that makes the most sense, pieced together from the Steam store page, frutigerdev’s patch notes and what launch-week players wrote in their reviews.
1. Pick a house (or a blank plot)
The house picker offers six pre-built layouts: Eco, Aero, Aqua, DORFic, Underwater and Metro. Each one unlocks an achievement the first time you enter. If you played the demo, your Eco house is already there, because the developer confirmed demo saves carry over.
You can also build a house from scratch. Pre-built houses cannot have their structure changed, so pick a blank plot if you want to place your own walls. Our houses page compares all six.
Tip from the reviews: the premade houses are big. Finish one room before you move to the next, or the space feels empty for hours.
2. Learn the build bar
In build mode the official screenshots show three toggles down the left side and three buttons in the bottom right:
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Snapping | Lines items up with each other. Turn it off for free placement |
| Allow Overlap | Lets objects sit inside each other (players call this ignoring collisions) |
| Remove | Toggles delete mode |
| Undo | Steps back the last change |
| Catalog | Opens the furniture and decor list |
| Exit Build | Back to walking around |
Selecting an item and opening Edit Style gives you a colour picker, a swatch chart, a hex field and saved custom colours. Almost every object can be resized, rotated and recoloured. More detail in the building tips.
3. Fly, and the keys worth knowing
One reviewer’s shortlist of things nobody tells you: press F to fly. It makes ceilings, lights and two-story builds much easier. The same reviewer says pressing the middle mouse button on objects is worth discovering for yourself, so try it on anything you have placed.
Azwell’s build videos on YouTube (a kitchen, a DORFic bedroom and a finished demo house) show a few more keys being used on default settings:
| Key | What it did in the videos |
|---|---|
| F | Fly (also confirmed by a Steam reviewer) |
| Z | Undo the last placement |
| E | Scale the selected item up |
| R | Remove mode. The creator kept hitting it by accident when reaching for T |
| Tab | Step through the sub-sections of a catalog category |
These come from one creator’s footage, not an official list, so check the controls page in the settings if a key does something different for you.
4. Set the mood
Walk out of the entrance elevator and turn left. The small wall screen opens a settings panel for the house: weather, time of day and sky colour. Setting the sky to red unlocks Frutiger Evil. See the settings panel.
5. Add music and pictures
Radios play music, and the in-game settings also hold a global music player. You can upload your own .mp3, .wav or .m4a files and many objects accept your own png or jpg images. Full steps: custom music and images.
6. Save and share
Your house saves as you decorate. To share it, use the Steam Workshop button on the main menu, added in patch v1.0.1. Early exports had bugs that patches v1.0.4 and v1.0.5 fixed; see the Workshop guide. To decorate together, read co-op and multiplayer.
If something goes wrong
Crashes on launch are the most common complaint in negative reviews. Lower ray tracing and shadows first, then follow the crash fix.
Thanks, noted. Happy decorating.