The Sims 4 Island Living Guide, From How To Become A Mermaid And ...

Other ways to get Mermaids in The Sims 4

For those players who want to dive right in and play with a mermaid character quickly, The Sims 4 has you covered in two other ways.

Create a Mermaid using Create-A-Sim

You can, if you prefer, simply create a mermaid in Create-A-Sim, either by starting a new game, or creating a new household to move in within an existing save file.

Upon entering Create-A-Sim, the randomly generated starting character will be a vanilla human. (Unless you're using the game's new Story Mode, which might assign you a mermaid character based on your answers to the quiz questions.)

To create a mermaid, you need to click the 'Add Character' icon next to the current character's portrait on the lower left hand corner of the screen, and select 'Add Occult Sim > Add Mermaid' from the pop-up menu.

This will create a second randomly generated character, but this one will be very unambiguously a mermaid: the Create-A-Sim background takes on a watery effect, a shoal of fishes will briefly swim around the new character, and - most tellingly - they'll have a fish tail instead of legs.

(You can delete the original human character by clicking the little cross on their character portrait, assuming you want this to be a mermaid-only household.) From here on in, the character creation process is much the same as always, except that you have both human and mermaid forms to customise.

There is one potentially major downside to making a mermaid in Create-A-Sim: you have to start from scratch. There's no way to import an existing human (or vampire/alien/ghost) character and change them into a mermaid during character creation.

This means that, even if your favourite Sim is safely stored in your library, ready to be re-added to your game as many times as you please, you can't turn them into a mermaid with a few simple clicks; you'll need to try something else. Which brings us rather neatly to...

Using Mermaid cheats

Let's be honest, cheating is a staple of The Sims series, and has been throughout the franchise's twenty-year history. You know it, I know it, and the developers know it - and no-one's judging anybody for it! That's why, to this day, the makers of The Sims go out of their way to make their cheat codes readily accessible and easy to use.

To become a mermaid using cheats, follow these steps:

1. Open the cheats console. (See our The Sims 4 cheats page for details on how to do this.) The console appears on the upper left hand of the screen
2. Type and enter testingcheats on or testingcheats true (either will work) to enable debugging cheat.
3. With your mermaid-to-be as your active character, enter the following cheat: Traits.Equip_Trait Trait_OccultMermaid

A chime will sound to indicate that you have entered the cheat correctly. The hidden 'Mermaid' trait is then activated on your character, and you should be able to proceed the same as if you had followed Method 1. (However, your Sim will not receive the 'Strange Sensations' moodlet that indicates the acquisition of the trait in normal gameplay.)

Be aware, however, that using debugging cheats to alter a Sim in-game carries a risk of causing glitches and corruption, so always save your game first.

If you encounter any errors and want to undo the harm - or if you simply want to reverse the process and have a mermaid become a human - follow Steps 1 and 2 as above, then for Step 3 substitute the cheat code Traits.Remove_Trait Trait_OccultMermaid.

Now you know how mermaids are made in The Sims 4, and you're ready to begin devoting full time to floating off the coast of Sulani!