In The Sims 4: Eco Lifestyle your Sims can choose to live a life that promotes eco-friendly behavior or one that industrializes the neighborhood. While there are of course cheats to change the footprint of your world, there are also many ways to alter it through gameplay.

It does take a while to adjust the entire eco-footprint, especially if the world is at the far end of the spectrum, but it can be done. Here we take a look at different ways you can adjust the eco status of your neighborhoods without having to cover entire lots with pollution generating items or plants.

Updated August 15th, 2020 By Helen Ashcroft: Now Eco Lifestyle has been out for a while, we know more about exactly how the eco-footprint system works. While the tips here are still valid, we’ve uncovered some more ways you can truly change the world around you in a way that hasn’t been seen since Seasons was released.

It’s also good to know that while the Neighborhood Action Plans do make a difference, you can disable these at the start of gameplay through the options menu and still change all of the in-game worlds without them, barring vacation worlds and Strangerville, which aren’t affected by the footprint system.

If you don’t want to use N.A.P.s, Just make sure you disable NPC voting before you hit the first voting period in a new save file. This will ensure that votes are only triggered by voting yourself.

15 Be Eco-Friendly: Use Green Energy

This one is straight forward enough. Green energy will improve any lot’s eco friendliness. Wind turbines, solar panels, and dew collectors all allow you to generate green energy that can be consumed or sold to the utility company.

Just make sure you keep your power generating devices in good shape. While items can be upgraded to reduce breakage, they still need attention. Solar panels need to be cleaned and repaired, turbines need to be fixed and the water valves on dew collectors can also break.

14 Industrialize: Burn Fossil Fuels

Burning regular fuel is the fastest way to create pollution but it’s best combined with other activities if you’re looking to maintain a regular looking household. While sending up a rocket will give you a temporary but huge pollution cloud, sustaining a regular output of smog is better.

Place and light a couple of fires, have a few generators and water filtration units that consume fuel in the back yard and don’t forget to use regular fuel, which is available using the currency generated by the recycler.

13 Be Eco-Friendly: Find Sustainable Building Materials

If you check the descriptions of different building items, mostly flooring and wall coverings, you’ll find that some contain a green footprint, as does most foliage. Anything with an eco-friendly footprint will help raise the level of eco-friendliness of your lot.

Garden items are a great way to boost your green footprint so adding extra plants and trees will help to boost your home’s green rating as will sustainable windows and doors.

12 Industrialize: Eliminate Eco-Friendly Bonuses

Eco-friendly bonuses can be anywhere and many build items contain them so you’ll want to swap these out. There are also items that contain industrial buffs so switch to those where possible.

For those who hate this idea, the building material buffs can be turned off in the game options. You can also just use items that are neutral and do not state one or the other as these will not affect your footprint at all.

11 Be Eco-Friendly: Upgrade Appliances

Upgrading your appliances is a great way to reduce their power or water consumption. You should also make sure to repair things as soon as possible, especially anything that leaks water when broken.

Using fabricated eco-friendly parts will make the repairs even greener but any repairs and upgrades can help reduce your utility usage and boost your green footprint. You can also restore and upcycle items using inventions from the Civil Designer career.

10 Industrialize: Use High Consumption Items

Certain items have consumption rates for water and power. This system is slightly erratic so you’ll need to look things up but there can be huge differences in the amount of water or power used. For example, some showers consume more water than others and some kitchen appliances use more power.

You can also increase overall power usage by placing as many high power and water consumption items as possible and setting all the lights to be permanently on. Not repairing broken sinks, toilets or showers also wastes water however remember that it will also increase your bills!

9 Be Eco-Friendly: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

You can find upgrade parts in the trash, recycle your garbage for parts, and scavage all kinds of things from the dumpster. If you want to truly live a sustainable lifestyle all of these will be useful.

The new freegan trait can help with dumpster diving and the recycle disciple trait is great for crafters. Just be warned that at the point of writing some players are reporting that the recycle disciple who doesn’t recycle often enough may begin to recycle random items in their home.

8 Industrialize: Go Into Debug Mode

This is technically a cheat but it’s a small one so we’re allowing it. While most items can be swapped out to eliminate the eco buffs foliage is a huge problem. However, this is where both the bb.showhiddenobjects and the bb.showliveeditobjects cheats come in handy.

There is a huge amount of foliage in these modes. Trees, hedges, flowers, bushes. All are not only present but are free and more importantly buff free. This means your lot can still look great while avoiding a boost to its green rating. Alternatively use the debug trash plants, grass, and actual trash items to truly embrace that smog life.

7 Be Eco-Friendly: Vote For Green N.A.P.s

Certain neighborhood action plans or N.A.P.s are eco friendly and will boost the entire neighborhood’s score. Using clean power and working together to conserve water and power will give the whole town a boost. Modernization in Evergreen Harbor will also help the area improve and seems to be the only way to clear up the trash in the area.

If you want to stop this from happening, keep an eye on the board. It’s also worth restating that other neighborhoods in all your worlds will vote when you do by default. If you find the N.A.P.s annoying, remember to turn this off.

6 Industrialize: Cause Some Fires

Causing fires turns out to be pretty easy in this expansion pack. You just need to visit the Greenburg’s and one of them will do it for you. However, as every good chaotic simmer knows there are many other ways to cause fire.

Cooking with low skill, leaving rugs by your fire, and being careless with a campfire will also do it, as will leaving broken generators in the rain. The fire itself will impact your footprint but leaving the burnt items in your yard seems to also help industrialize the area, or at least make it look the part.

5 Be Eco-Friendly: Utilize Community Lots

Community lots are a fantastic new addition to the game. They allow you swap between four different lot states, all without having to mess about with the gallery or your library. While the default way to swap is by voting, you can instantly swap using shift-click cheats on the voting board.

In order to make your home more eco-friendly, these community lots can easily be utilized to improve your skills without needing to own a huge range of electronic power using items like computers and fabricators.

4 Industrialize: Trash Your Community Lots

Community lots can also be repurposed for industrial as well as eco purposes. You could create a city dump, a power station, or some other industrial building. The more pollution generating items and decor the better.

When community lots are so flexible, having different options for different footprints and switching them around works well in all worlds to easily adjust the footprint. Why not create a swatch of four industrial builds to scatter across your worlds?

3 Be Eco-Friendly: Add Parks And Green Spaces

Adding green spaces and parks to empty lots is one of the quickest ways to improve a world footprint. Foliage and plants have some of the highest eco-friendly footprints in the game so all parks will have a positive effect.

Combine these trees with small facilities built with green materials and you have a solution that’s both stylish and practical. You can also use community gardens to have the same effect, but these often have far fewer trees and plants by default.

2 Industrialize: Change Every Lot

When changing the town’s footprint every lot has to change. All the tips above need to be applied to stand a chance of moving into smog. It seems easier to move up into green but especially if coming down from green you’ll need to adjust everything.

Some lots won’t go industrial but you’ll at least need to get them to neutral and remove any eco-friendly lot traits in order to bring the whole area down. The default is to improve the neutral to positive so the game does fight you a little when going heavily into the world of smog.

1 Choose Your Path With Cheats

Finally, if you want to tell a specific story without going through all your worlds then cheats are here to help. Start a new save file, turn on footprints but turn off NPC voting and then use these cheats to customize your options.

After setting testing cheats to on the code Eco_Footprint.St_Eco_Footprint_State X is your friend. Replace the X with 0 for Green, 1 for neutral, and 2 for industrial to change the neighborhood footprint. You’ll also notice that if you shift-click the mailbox or N.A.P board you can instantly enact or repeal any N.A.P in that neighborhood.

NEXT: The Sims 4: 10 Things You Need To Know Before You Buy Eco Lifestyle