The Sims 4

The Sims 4 hides a surprising amount of itself behind two toggles. The cheat pages below all start from the first of them and both mod walkthroughs start from the second: the cheat console, which answers to Ctrl, Shift and C on Windows, Command, Shift and C on Mac, and all four of the shoulder and trigger buttons together on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and the pair of tick boxes under Game Options for custom content and script mods. Until the right one is on, a good deal of what follows simply will not respond. What follows is sorted by what you are trying to do with your Sim rather than by where the pages live.

Start with the console

Our Sims 4 cheats list is filed by what you want changed rather than alphabetically, with a separate heading for each family of codes. Beyond the money and skill lines, it covers relationship commands such as modifyrelationship with a value of 100 on LTR_Friendship_Main or LTR_Romance_Main, live mode conveniences like sims.fill_all_commodities for topping every motive in the household at once, and the blunter end of the catalogue: death.toggle true and false, and sims.add_buff Ghostly, which makes a Sim a ghost for four in-game hours. Shop owners get the retail perk unlocks and restaurant owners get theirs on the same page. For a tour of which of these shortcuts actually saves you anything, our cheats and careers guide ranks them by how much of the played game they remove.

Earning a living

If the question is simply which job pays best, the highest paying jobs chart answers it by weekly wage across every expansion. Acting takes first place at §19,600 a week for one hour of work on two days, the best hourly rate on its own chart by a wide margin, and the ten entries actually cover eight careers, because Secret Agent and Style Influencer each place two branches in the list. The same page closes with a wage table of forty four full time branches and ten part time jobs, which is the fastest way to compare a branch you are considering against the one you already have.

Nine jobs now have a write-up of their own, and our careers guide sorts them by shape rather than by wage: seven promotion ladders that branch once, one active career you play the shift of, and one that is a business rather than a job at all. Two of those nine are worth naming here. The Salary Person career is the family-friendly one on paper, since it never runs at weekends, but the weekdays are long at roughly ten to twelve hours with overtime on offer, and reward traits such as seldom sleepy or never weary are worth picking up to cope with them. The vet career in Cats and Dogs is a business instead of a job: perk points arrive for daily targets such as treating two patients or giving an inspirational speech, staff are hired, trained, promoted and fired from the register in the corner of the screen, and income comes from treatments, monthly vaccinations and a pet treat vending machine sold at a markup. When you are done with it, the same register sells the clinic on.

Skipping the promotion ladder

Promotions are the quickest thing here to cheat, one rank per command until a Sim reaches the top position. Our career cheats page lists a promotion code for every job in both its tables, and the same command demotes when you want a Sim to fall back down a few rungs. The part-time table is worth a look for its own sake, since it takes in Volunteer E-Sports and a Volunteer Soccer Team alongside the more familiar Barista and Lifeguard shifts.

The objects a career hands out are a separate unlock, and the career items guide covers both the honest and the quick way to get them. It also picks out the rewards worth chasing: investing in stocks from the Business track, hacking the mainframe from Criminal, giving other Sims makeovers from Style Influencer, and streaming games for a second income from Tech Guru. Click one of these objects and choose its Emotional Aura option and the related skill starts climbing faster, which is the part people tend to miss.

Living an occult life

Vampires need their own expansion and their own vocabulary, so our vampire cheats page runs through the whole power board rather than a handful of codes. Bat Form, Mist Form, Mesmerize, Supernatural Speed, Garlic Immunity and Irresistible Slumber all have unlock lines, as do the graded powers that come in three steps, such as sun resistance and vampiric strength. Vampire energy can be filled or drained outright, weaknesses can be removed without giving up the powers you bought while a second line refunds the power points and resets the board, and if you want the other outcome there is a line that kills a vampire by sunlight. Each of the power lines ends with a Sim ID, which you look up with a separate command first.

When a Sim dies anyway

Death in The Sims 4 is reversible more often than players expect, and our guide to bringing a dead Sim back to life collects every route we know of. Some are opportunistic: if the Grim Reaper is standing near a Sim who is about to go, you can plead with him, and a Voodoo Doll set to Toy with Death flips a coin between reaping and reviving. Some are purchases: the Wishing Well runs six outcomes, from an instant revival with a day of immunity through a free plate of Ambrosia or its raw ingredients, down to a rejected wish, a four hour lockout and an outright death. And one is not a game mechanic at all, since quitting without saving rolls the whole household back to the last save, at the price of everything else you did that session.

Mods that change the rules

Our best mods roundup sorts the field by what each mod is there to fix, and the UI Cheats Extension has a page of its own because it replaces most of the console work the pages above describe with a right click. Two more mods get full walkthroughs here, and all of them need the script mods box ticked before the game will load them. The Basemental Drugs mod adds ten substances with their own animations, moodlets and consequences, bought from a dealer you assign in the mod's settings or grown yourself, with addiction, overdose and a visit from the Grim Reaper all on the table for a careless Sim. It also ships its own cheat options: a Sim's Drugs menu logs that Sim's attributes, buffs, stats or relations to a file and switches the cigarette cancer warning off, while a console opened with Ctrl, Shift and R takes bm_r_ad to clear every addiction at once. The Realistic Pregnancy mod by PandaSama goes the other way and adds friction: it needs Get to Work, it offers a surgery table, natural birth or a C-section chosen by phoning an obstetrician, and natural birth holds the delivery until a Sim reaches ten centimetres of dilation, with an epidural available from six and pre-birth exercises, yoga ball work and walks to speed things along. You can also nominate a second Sim to be present, provided the two are close.

Making the game harder on purpose

The opposite instinct is served by the Not So Berry challenge, a ten generation legacy run named after the community shorthand for a Sim with a bright hair, eye or skin colour. Each heir inherits a colour and a set of objectives to clear before the next one takes over, and they get specific in a hurry: the first generation completes the Elements collection and masters Mischief and Logic, the third has to reach the secret lot in Oasis Springs and finish at least ten wood sculptures as a teenager, and the seventh has to collect every postcard while keeping a garden and pond in good order. It is the one guide here that treats the console as a setup tool rather than a solution.

Where to start

If you have just installed the game, read the cheats list far enough to enable testing cheats before anything else, because most of the cheat pages here start from that point. If you are mid-save and short of simoleons, the wage chart will tell you whether the branch you are on is worth finishing, and the careers guide will tell you what the job on the other side of the fork actually asks of a Sim's week. If you have been playing for years and the loop has gone stale, the vet clinic, a vampire household and the ten generation challenge all change what a session of The Sims 4 asks of you, and the two mods above change what is in it.