Examples of Game Breakers from The Sims. The Sims 3 has its own page.
The Sims
- The woodworking table in the original The Sims. Using this object, a Sim crafts a lawn gnome which can be sold. A Sim with a perfect mechanical skill that starts the day in a good mood can make about twenty gnomes in a standard eight-hour day. Each gnome sells for $100, resulting in a $2,000 daily income, which is significantly more than the highest-paying conventional career (which leads to a bit of Fridge Logic when you realize that a gnome craftsman can make more money than a business tycoon or an A-list movie star). The best part? As opposed to the normal career paths, you can set your own hours, work as little or as much as you want, don't need to raise other skills, and don't have to worry about making and maintaining friendships. The only downside is that working on the table is taxing on your sim's fun and energy levels. However, since you'll be quickly able to afford all the best mood-raising items and equipment, this downside is easily mitigated.
- Another method is the "Perfect Sim" method, which makes a sim max out their personality stats which may or may not be useful depending on who you ask. To do it, you need to have Livin' Large to have a chemistry set, and make a sim who has no points to any of his personality and a lot with at least the chemistry set inside it. Make the sim keep using the chemistry set until he gets a yellow potion, then have him drink it so he'll reverse his personality, maxing them out. A similar method can be done for pre-existing sims who already have some points in personality, which require them to have a yellow potion handy, and have at least two sims in their lot. The sim who will have maxed out personality must be close to the other and must be killed while the other pleads for their life (which may take awhile) until the dead sim is revived as a zombie. Because zombies have no personality, it will empty the personality points the sim already had, and they can then drink the yellow potion to max their personality out.
- The Chinese fan, an official downloadable item makes earning money a complete and utter joke. Its purchase price is $99, which is among the lowest in the game. Wait one day and it appreciates to $492. All money woes are solved. Bonus, the Sim suffers no job-related motive decay nor requires any skills or friends.
The Sims 2
- Open for Business adds the ability to make robots using a crafting bench, culminating with the ability to make a humaniod, fully controlable robot called Servo. The kicker is that the Servo inherits all the skills, abilities, and personality of its maker, meaning that it can immediately be put to work on creating more Servos. Within days you can have an exponentially increasing population of robots in your backyard, and given that creating a Servo costs $3,000 and selling one gives you $6,000, this essentially equals unlimited money.
- Open for Business also allows you to make flower arrangements. The highest tier flower arrangement you can make is the Snapdragon, which occasionally releases a cloud of perfume that fills all of a Sim's requirement bars except energy. Spread clusters of them them around your house, and you'll never need to do anything but sleep and fulfill aspirations.
- Open for Business also contains a much more extreme game breaker - by exploiting a quirk in the way businesses work, plus the aforementioned Snapdragons, it is possible to make MILLIONS
of simoleans per day. Notably, you can legitimately earn money from a business faster than by entering the "motherlode" cheat code repeatedly. - Bon Voyage added massage tables. Two of the massages fill Fun and Comfort which is nice but not game breaking. The third massage, Acupressure, fills Energy and does so faster than sleeping - so a pair of Sims who know how to perform an Acupressure massage can keep each other going indefinitely without ever sleeping, needing only a massage table and some snapdragons.
- Apartment Life adds magic into the game by allowing sims to become witches/warlocks. Not only are some of their abilities/spells ridiculously overpowered (instant teleportation (though this was already available in Bon Voyage), timestop), but once they reach maximum skill and alignment they gain the ability to craft a throne for themselves. This special chair replenishes all their needs very much like the Energizer aspiration reward item, but unlike that can be used an unlimited number of times with no chance of failure (as long as the witch/warlock doesn't switch to the opposite alignment), completely negating the need for any other items or activities.
- Generally speaking, The Sims, and The Sims 2, suffers from Power Creep: with each successive expansion pack, Sims gain more and more advantages with fewer drawbacks. By the final expansion pack of the original Sims (Makin' Magic), the player could do literally anything within the game engine, including auto-promotions and free friends, without any effort. The Sims 2 tried to counter-balance the bonuses with penalties, particularly penalties that require either large amounts of recovery time (due to lowered stats) or large investments of time themselves (FreeTime expansion pack, for example). In short, The Sims games eventually deliver themselves into Game-Breaker status, and that's not even including the undocumented Game Breakers that people are able to find. By the time the Power Creep gets out of control, Maxis/EA simply reboots with the next game (The Sims 3, in this case).
- The dev team REALLY didn't think of just how exploitable some of the game features are. A vampire can run a business and bite all his employees so they can work happily all night, or a witch can craft some thrones, convert her employees to witches and they can work FOREVER. A vampire can make a killing with the wrecked car from Free Time, by spending all night fixing one, selling it for 5,200 simoleons and then only needing a shower and maybe a coffee after he's finished. Vampires also have the easiest pregnancies ever thanks to their lack of motive decay at night.
- Plant sims from the Seasons expansion require only water (by washing or by drinking), sunshine, and "love" (social interaction). They can spawn young who inherit their skills, and speak fluent plant (enabling them to farm perfect produce and fulfill their "love" need at the same time). Give one a sink, a sunlamp, and a garden plot, and they're set until they die of old age (or become vampire plantsims, which can't take natural sunlight but do fine under a sunlamp).
- That may have been one reason why they made non-knowledge sims want all paranormals cured, and feared becoming paranormals, though this does smack of Tall Poppy Syndrome.
- There's also the pink flamingo lawn ornaments which cost under 20 simoleans and can be kicked repeatedly to rapidly fill up a Sim's Fun motive.
Spin-off Games
- The Urbz, a console exclusivenote Sims game set on a big city, have a recliner chair at one area that refills all your energy in two seconds.
- The Sims 2: Castaway: another console exclusive, takes this to a ridiculous degree. There's an Easter Egg where sending an SOS on Crystal Island will cause your Sim to be abducted by aliens, which maxes out all their needs (except Fun, which is set to half). This only takes about 20 seconds, you can do it as often as you like, and there are no downsides. Seeing as a lot of the gameplay is about balancing your Sims' needs, this makes most of the game completely pointless. There's no need to build a base, sleep, cook meals, interact with anyone, gather food, wash, go to the toilet or even switch Sims. You can just have one Sim work 24/7 on whatever goal you want, send them off to be abducted whenever their needs drop too low, and then immediately set them back to work. All this is slightly mitigated by the fact that Crystal Island only appears a long way into the game, but still...
- To a lesser degree, hot springs. Sitting in them will max out your Sim's comfort need and will increase their hygiene to a much higher level than swimming in the sea would. There's also a high chance that you'll be joined by another Sim who will chat to also raise your social need as well as building relationship. This allows you to raise three needs at once while also improving your relationships. To top it all off, if your base or controllable Sim is in an area with hot springs then your other Sims will automatically use them, keeping their needs high for whenever you want to switch to them.
