In this final report in this series, I will be looking at what ways there are to cheat in the game and sorting out some loose ends. Also, having had a lot of experience playing the game, I will be looking back and giving my opinion on how it could be improved and what I would like to see next.
There are some people who can only play the game by cheating. To help these people play the game the way that they want to, there are cheats available within the game. This is not surprising. There have always been cheats in The Sims. I admit that I cheat from time to time and I am also holding my hand up here to say that there are a few cheats that I would have liked to see but that not make the final cut.
Accessing cheats is no different to previous simcarnations where you press Shift+Ctrl+C to open up the cheatbox at the top of the screen. A quick way to find some cheats is to key in "help" and this will bring up a list of some but not all of the cheats.
To see a list of most cheats, type "help" into the cheatbox. This will come up with a list of many but not all of the cheat codes. To see details about a certain cheat, type "help [cheatcode]" into the cheatbox.
Here are some that I find useful but also in some respects quite risky.
SHOW ME THE MONEY
I will go out on a limb here and say that getting more money are the most common cheats played in The Sims 3. In my house, it is certainly the case.
One evening when I took a break from playing The Sims 3 and went to watch some TV in the living room, my office chair was quickly filled by my daughters as they set about creating a new family. Within a matter of minutes, though, they suddenly appeared next to me, smiling sweetly and asking "Dad, how do we get more money?"
The basic money cheats are the same as they were in TS2 and are as follows.
There is a third more advanced money cheat that I will be coming to later.
Note As an aside, does anyone out there remember having to key in "klapaucius" for extra money?
MOVING AROUND
moveObjects [on/off] - or "MOO" as I call it - is still here and allows the players to put an object where you would not have normally been able to place it. It is limited to the designated lot, however, so you cannot put something in the middle of the road or even on the pavement outside your own home, let alone dropping something into your neighbour's garden. It also allows you to delete things that are not normally deletable. This can be risky if you accidentally delete the mailbox. the rubbish bin or sims themselves. Use with caution!!
These two cheats below do not require the cheatbox but require other mixed combinations instead. Normal gameplay allows us to place objects at 45 degree angles but these cheats allow us to place almost anywhere and at any angle. Both involve being in Build or Buy Mode. I have found these cheats to be are especially useful for natural looking gardens.
The disablesnappingtoslotsonAlt on cheat disables this ability. Personally, I can't see any use for it.
BUILDING IT UP
For those of you who want to do more advanced things when building houses, constrainfloorelevation [true/false] allows you to tinker with the height of layers and so forth. This is useful when trying to build angled stairs or you wish to enclose the ugly looking red chimneystacks in the game. Our own designer TammyB has used this cheat in the creation of some of the lots she has uploaded here.
RETURN OF THE UBERCHEAT
With The Sims 2, "boolprop testingcheatsenabled true" was incredibly powerful and allowed you to run a series of advanced cheats, which if not handled properly could mess up someone's whole neighborhood. Albeit without the boolprop, the same code is back and once again allows you access to a hidden series of cheats either through Shift+Clicking on various things or keying in another code. Although testingcheatsenabled (TCE) it does not appear to be as powerful as its TS2 predecessor, it is still quite powerful in itself.
Shift+Click on Non-Playable Sim - The cheats here are Add to Active Family and Trigger Age Transition. With the former, it gets around those sims who the option to invite to move in never comes up. If the sim is already a member of the household, this option does not appear. With the latter, you can kill off that old neighbour and get away with it.
Shift+Click on Active Sim - The cheats here are Modify Traits and Trigger Age Transition. The first one could save a lot of LRPs as you can revamp your sim's traits without having to spend 20,000 of them on "Midlife Crisis". This way, you can really mix up someone's personality whenever you please. The latter does what it says on the tin. Instant birthday and the next life stage begins. This has its uses, especially if you are wanting to race through a few generations unlike muggins here.
Shift+Click on Playable but not Active Sim - There is one choice and that is triggering age transition. Only wise to use if you want to age a sim.
Shift+Click on Mailbox - The cheats here include making the need bars static (or making them dynamic if there are static already), forcing visitors or NPCs to turn up, and making everyone be the active sim's acquaintances or friends. The other choice, which I find to be the most interesting, is that of Set Career. Yes, we know that getting onto the bottom rung of a specific career ladder is easy, but through this cheat, it means that if a sim wants to become an astronaut overnight, this is how you do it.
Shift+Click on Workplace - The cheats here are to do with forcing events. I admit that this is useful if your sim wants a payrise. I do not know if it works on giving sims work-based opportunities, however.
Shift+Click on Ground - The cheat here is another LRP saver as Teleport me here does what it says on the tin and quickly gets a sim from Point A to Point B. Therefore, a sim does not need to save up for that teleporter pad and can instead spend it on more useful things. This cheat is very useful if they have missed the carpool or are so tired after a hard day's work that they want to be right next to their bed so they can go to sleep without the risk of falling asleep in the carpool on the way home and being dumped by the side of the road. Yes, it has happened to one of my sims.
Although I am finding story-writing to not be as pleasurable in The Sims 3 as I found it in The Sims 2, I would have liked to see various cheats to help with this.
As there is no tombstone of life & death, there is no way that I have found to kill sims off simply without it being of old age. Boring. With TS2, I did derive some pleasure from letting dull sims get hit by falling satelites or swarms of flies.
There is no way to increase skill levels. With TS2, skill levels could be dragged up once the TCE was enabled. Also, a spawnable object allowed us to even improve their talent badge levels. Not the case with TS3, but if I do find ways to do it, I'll be back.
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