A highly detailed home lot in The Sims 4 with characters walking around it.

The Sims 4: How to Get Debug Items

Unlock all of the hidden treasures The Sims 4 has to offer by adding debug items to your catalog.

March 21, 2023 - 4 min read

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Alex is a games journalist and narrative designer. She's written for a variety of popular gaming websites and enjoys narrative-driven adventure games. When not writing, reading or exploring the wilds of an open-world RPG, you'll find her drawing, designing quests or learning the ropes of Unreal Engine.

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Marshall Gunnell

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Key Takeaway

You’ll need to enable cheats on your game to access all of The Sims 4‘s hidden debug items. Once you’ve entered the right cheat codes, you’ll be able to use around 1,200 new objects.

If you want to add a whole host of new content to your world in The Sims 4, you’ll need to know how to get debug items. These hidden treasures will help you improve your gameplay and even help you obtain objects to help advance your Sims’ goals.

What Are Debug Items in The Sims 4?

Essentially, debug items are a variety of objects that aren’t normally available from the in-game Build or Buy menus. The Sims 4 has a huge number of hidden debug items that can be unlocked. Many of these are decorative and can help you improve the look and feel of your Sims’ environments.

However, some of these items are pretty useful and can be used to help you boost a Sim’s career faster. There are also hard-to-find items such as collectibles in the list of debug items, plus building-based content that’d be otherwise unavailable.

To get your hands on all of this hidden content, you’ll need to use a special debug cheat in The Sims 4. A variety of cheats can be used in The Sims 4 using the game’s cheat console, which will need to be enabled in your game first.

The debug items cheat is a useful one if you’re looking to get into much more detail with your building and decorating your Sims’ homes. It’s also useful if you’re trying to help meet your Sims’ particular wants and career goals by owning certain objects.

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Cheats and Achievements

It’s important to note that using the main cheat console to enable cheat mode in The Sims 4 will disable achievements. There are some exceptions to this, such as using minor cheats to move objects. However, if you want to unlock debug items, it’ll mean you won’t be able to earn achievements or trophies on that particular save.

You may want to try this cheat out on a new game save first, to avoid progress toward achievements on your main game being halted. You can always add it to your main game later if you choose.

Enabling Cheats in The Sims 4

Before you can access the new hidden debug items, you’ll have to enable and activate cheats on your game. Doing this differs slightly depending on the platform you’re playing The Sims 4 on.

On Xbox – press all four trigger buttons at once (RB + RT + LB + LT)
On PlayStation – press all four trigger buttons at once (R1 + R2 + L1 + L2)
On PC – hold down Ctrl and Shift and press C
On Mac – hold down Command and Shift and press C

This will prompt a keyboard box to pop up on your screen, into which you should enter the phrase testingcheats true and press Enter. This will enable cheats on your save and you should see a message pop up on-screen to confirm this. The message will also confirm that achievements will be disabled once cheats are activated on your game. If you’re happy with this, you can go ahead and accept.

You’ll need to activate this first before you can enter any further cheat codes into the console. Otherwise, additional cheats won’t work without testingcheats mode being toggled on.

How to Get Debug Items

Now that you’ve enabled cheat mode in your game, you can enter some new codes into the cheat console. To unlock all of the game’s debug items, you’ll need to input the following codes into it.

Simply follow the steps below to get your hands on all of the game’s hidden items. It’s important to carry out these steps in the exact order, otherwise, your cheats won’t work properly and you won’t be able to access the new items.

Enter Build Mode whilst in your game
Bring up the cheat console – you can do this by pressing the same buttons as before on your chosen platform
Enter the code bb.showHiddenObjects and press Enter
Enter the code bb.showLiveEditObjects and press Enter
Go to the search bar in Build Mode
Type in debug
You’ll now see a list of new debug items in the Build and Buy catalog to select from

These two codes will unlock all of the unique hidden content The Sims 4 has to offer. This includes around 1200 different items, so there’ll be a lot of new objects in the Build and Buy catalog to sift through. If you become overwhelmed with all of the options, or simply don’t want to scroll through so many items, you can always disable the debug items cheat later.

Disabling the Debug Items Cheat

To turn the debug items cheat off and remove all of the previously hidden items from your Build and Buy catalog, carry out the following steps.

Bring up the cheat console
In the keyboard pop-up box that appears, enter testingcheats false
Press Enter – you’ll see a confirmation message pop up to indicate that cheats have been disabled
All debug items should now be removed from your Build and Buy catalog

You’ll need to re-enable the debug items cheat if you want to access the hidden items again in the future.

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