Does Testingcheatsenabled [t/f] and Switching households hurt your game?

[BlessedNica]

I keep seeing people saying that if you always use Testingcheatsenabled [t/f] all the time (even if you switch it off within a few seconds of turning it on) that it can ruin your game and make it crash?

I also heard that if you always switch households that you're messing up your game and it will "never work after a number of times of switching households." I don't understand the household switching because the Sims 3 creators wouldn't put that option if they thought it would mess up the game?

I ask because I do these all the time, however I never leave Testingcheatsenabled [t/f] for more than 5 minutes. Is what other people say true or false?

[whiterider]

No, both of those claims are wrong.

testingCheats does enable some hidden menu options which you can use to break your game - the way to avoid that is to not click options you don't know anything about at random, which I guess you probably don't do anyway. In TS2, it was always rumoured that leaving testingCheats on and then quitting the game could prevent you from loading the neighbourhood in future; I don't know if that was actually true in TS2, but it is certainly not in TS3.

Switching households won't break your game either. If you don't have the basic mods (Overwatch, primarily) installed, then performance in all of your saves will worsen over time: that can be aggravated by playing lots of different households in one town, but that's related to the number of sims and memories etc., not how many times you switch households. In any case, it's not much of a problem if you have the proper mods installed.

Do be aware that switching houses will, by default, wipe all your sims' opportunities and dreams - that can be changed with MasterController, if it annoys you.