No Mods, No Cheats, and No Debug

I've never cared for the rags to riches way of playing. I found myself making sure my sim survived to the point that there was no room for a story to develop. I typically let the game decide what happens, which is rare without mods but still possible. Unless my sim dies straight out of CAS (also rare), I don't restart.

Waiting to see what mods break and get updated is the downside of using mods. Thankfully, most of the mods I use get updated quickly. I usually build and create sims for my save after a big update.

I don’t use mods or CC. I do use kaching or mother lode for some of the premade families in my saves, like the Goths, Landgrabbs, and Calientes. Mostly because I have them own businesses, since I prefer using businesses mostly to go to rather than run. I play rotationally and I don’t really play the premades as much as I do my own sims. That is about the only cheat I used for a long time and I started my main save in December of 2014 with a lot of “save as” along the way. For me, this is the best sims game for not crashing, and I love that my sims can move around to other towns and keep all of their friends ( which are mostly sims I created and play too ).

The last 6 months or I have started using a few more cheats.

I started using some moo when I want to fit more objects onto a dresser or something ( in sims 2 I used it a lot ). I think I started out using it because I wanted to make fake changing tables, which we don’t need now with GT. Now I will also use it when rearranging furniture and stuff to either put the backs of things closer together or to center things better, as well as cluttering up a dresser and such. I also love it for landscaping.

The last few years I have gotten so frustrated with dirt piles and trying to figure out why they are happening that I started using a cheat to put them back to normal. I will say one thing that helps with them when on the home lot is fast forwarding through 5 o’clock in the morning. But they still happen going off lot and such. I got tired of saving every 5 minutes, and going out of and back into the save. and the cheat works great, it takes some time ( I wish there was a cheat to reset them all at once ), but it sure helps with the frustration of seeing those dirt piles. Most of my sims do some type of gardening as I use the simple living trait a LOT! I sure wish they would spend the time to come up with a simple clothing trait so I would have to buy my sims clothing. I don’t normally play legacy type saves because it gets so boring for me, but i might play a rags to riches game if we had a simple clothing trait that opened up each piece of clothing, hats, shoes, jewelry, socks, etc. by buying them. For rags to riches I would start my sims off with only a few pieces to begin with and match them up together, just enough pieces to fit in a suitcase, like one pair of shorts, one t-shirt, one pair of pants, one sleep/lingerie item, and one jacket/cold weather item, and probably even have them wear the shorts and t-shirt for swimming till they could afford a swim suit, they could use the t-shirt for sleepwear actually. Making sims buy or grow their own food is great, now I just need that simple clothing trait.

I also use a cheat to cheat away lifestyles I don’t think my sims should have, my farmer became a technophobe which he wasn’t suppose to be, being technophobe not only made him down while watching a movie after a hard days work, but would not let him work on his wood crafting bench ( which he was supposed to love ). Although recently I saw there is something on the phone where you can change them now.

I’m sure glad they made it where Sims weren’t always dissatisfied with their jobs and things. That was killing the mood on so many of my sims that liked exactly where they were in life, and were not particularly wanting to move up in their job. Sometimes I want a secretary to stay a secretary and enjoy other parts of her life like clubbing…. Lol. Although I did have one lazy sim that I made do hard labor that was always depressed and sad which made me laugh as he was supposed to be that way, he had to work because he had to support his child…. Lol, but he hated working at his dead end job….. lol, the dead end job thing just made him feel worse on top of already hating work. A little back story here …. I’m one of those people who have mostly happy cheerful sims.


I haven’t tried debug or hidden objects yet, but a lot of lots and rooms I download use it. I will probably try into that later.

I never use skill, or mood, cheats or change my sims in any other cheat way.

I am enjoying reading what others are doing and not doing with mods and cheats.

I am donating to Pantreon for one Mod creator that I was using her mods, and will support her for a few more months, if just as a thank you for what I did already use. Her mods are not sloppy at all, and she updates them immediately. If I start using mods again, I'll start with just hers. The more that I mix and match mod creators, the more that I fear that I will break my game. I don't want to just limit the number of mods, but I want to limit the number of creators.

I feel safer using cheats and debug than I do mods and CC.

At the very least, playing with absolutely no mods or cheats lets me get a feel for what is broken and glitching in the game. I am glad that I did the mountain climbing with nothing added.

For a rags to riches start with no cheat, make your sim and make a dummy sim with it. Place them in the lot then in manage household split them up giving the dummy sim all the money and evicting it, you can delete him after. Can't test it right now but it should work.

"Ninoosim;c-18288480" wrote:
For a rags to riches start with no cheat, make your sim and make a dummy sim with it. Place them in the lot then in manage household split them up giving the dummy sim all the money and evicting it, you can delete him after. Can't test it right now but it should work.

Thank you!!!!!

"Ninoosim;c-18288480" wrote:
For a rags to riches start with no cheat, make your sim and make a dummy sim with it. Place them in the lot then in manage household split them up giving the dummy sim all the money and evicting it, you can delete him after. Can't test it right now but it should work.

This is such a good idea! Splitting the household is easy to add to the storytelling. One story could be that the split Sim was paid to sneak the main sim over the borders into the world and he leaves with his payment.

I had to start over, so I decided to at least start with no mods and cheats again. One thing that I learned is that to play the Globetrotter or Supersim challenges with no cheats, you need a fairly generic Sim rather than one that is optimized to play the first round of aspirations. I think I might even need to turn off lifestyle and discoveries. When you are done with the first round, the Sim will rebel against the new aspirations and be MISERABLE and refuse to complete the next round.

No cheats and mods is a challenge in ways that I did not predict. It is a challenge, though, and right before a new EP, it is a good time to tackle a challenge of no mods.

The plants drove me crazy last time. I am not sure how I will handle that this time.

I used to use cheats a lot in TS3 and vowed to not even look them up when TS4 came out. I didn't keep that vow but I still don't cheat too much. At most, I may cheat my sims' needs a bit if they have infants and toddlers, or if they're a few hundred simoleons from buying a bigger house (and they really need it). For the most part, I don't use cheats unless necessary.

And I mostly forget about debug, only using it more recently because of Better Build/Buy mod. I mostly use it for the plants so the landscaping on my lots will blend into the worlds better.

As far as playing without mods, I played TS4 for the majority of its lifespan (thus far) without them. I only began using them in/around 2020 or so. I don't foresee ever not playing without them now. Vanilla was fun for a while but I like the attraction system with Wonderful Whims, all of the things offered with MCCC. Those are 2 mods I can't/won't play without.

Debug landscaping is what I miss most right now. I never used cheats to fill needs and gain money, but I did use them to add traits and abilities. I added the traits for storytelling purposes, but some of them certainly did make it easier for the character to gain aspiration milestones.

I cannot remember when I last started with all my money instead of "cheating" to only have $0. With the extra money, I can immediately work on gaining the traits that I used to cheat, instead of having to immediately fish and dig and garden. This is a different path to the same end goal. It is interesting to me. I am not yet interested in altering the code of the game, but I am interested in studying how the game works on this more upper level.

I needed a LOT of mods to play a child alone. That was an interesting challenge. I am ready for an entirely different challenge right now. It is handy that I have the urge to play this way right now, before a new EP drops and disrupts the modding community.

I don't have a single mod or cheat, and my game has been lagging. Lag is very very rare for me. Also, I don't think the mountain climbing is completely fixed. At least I KNOW this is not mods. If I start adding some mods back in, I won't be blaming mods for any of this.

I kept my starting $20K and finished a 28 day summer with double that. I had much more room to develop my sim without having to create a sim that could survive with no money. Mods would have given me even more opportunities to develop my Sim. I'm not ready to add in mods yet, but the more this unmodded game glitches, the more I miss my mods instead of hold them responsible.

"SheriSim57;c-18287973" wrote:
I don’t use mods or CC. ...

The last few years I have gotten so frustrated with dirt piles and trying to figure out why they are happening that I started using a cheat to put them back to normal. I will say one thing that helps with them when on the home lot is fast forwarding through 5 o’clock in the morning. But they still happen going off lot and such. I got tired of saving every 5 minutes, and going out of and back into the save. and the cheat works great, it takes some time ( I wish there was a cheat to reset them all at once ), but it sure helps with the frustration of seeing those dirt piles. Most of my sims do some type of gardening as I use the simple living trait a LOT! ...

The dirt piles made me too angry! I am playing the Globetrotter Challenge, so change lots every season. I lost my chance to evolve the plants for the last milestone on TWO lots before it was time to move on! I "cheated" the plants back to the stage they were in before I left the lot. If I were on console, I would have to just suck it up. I'm not on console. I don't have to suck it up. I am adding back in "cheats" that are not cheats.