u/DoubleBakedCupcake

So, I’m someone who is very picky about lifespans in lifesims. I like for them to feel realistic in proportion. In The Sims, I always set custom lifespans (in settings for sims 3, with mods for sims 2 and 4) and I like to have it so that a certain number of days will equal one “year” of age. In sims 4, I’ll either do 8 day years for a savefile where I want it shorter, or 16 day years for longer. And when I want to know a sim’s exact age, I have to see how many days they have left until aging up and then just math it out to see how old they are.

In Paralives, in the in game UI, it shows you which age group your Para is in, and how many days until they age up to the next stage. But if you enter the cheat “PrintAge” it’ll tell you their age in years. Example if you create a fresh Young Adult Para and do PrintAge, it’ll say 18. And you can also use the cheat “SetAge x” to set your para to an age, in years, and it’ll automatically calculate the right number of days remaining in that life stage!

And, they’ve made it fairly easy to make your own mod to set the specific number of days in an age span. I was able to make a mod for my own custom lifespans with zero knowledge of coding! Though, I do really hope we can simply choose that in the Storyteller settings one day. And I do love that we can set the pregnancy duration in Storyteller! In line with always needing my realistic ages, I like for my pregnancy lengths to always be 75% of whatever a year is for any given setting.

When you go to make a mod and open the “control panel” you can find a label called life spans (or maybe it was age spans?) and clicking that will bring up a window where you can edit each life stage. You choose how many days they’ll stay in that stage, and also choose what age (in years) they’ll be at the start of the life stage.

So, you could actually have it so “years” are a different number of days for kids vs adults, which honesty does make sense because of how life sims work, realistically I understand why someone might want kids to age relatively slower, but personally that does bother me, so I set all my numbers accordingly so that it works out the same.

I went with a much shorter lifespan than I do for Sims, I went with 3 days = 1 year of age, at least for now while there’s not a whole ton to do in the game.

So for baby, I entered the starting age as 0, which was of course also the default, then changed days in life stage to 6.

By default the game considers Paras preteen when they’re 9, but I actually upped that 10.

But yeah, I just LOVE that the game actually calculates their age in years, even if it’s only doing it “under the hood” so to speak.

I feel like this could be potentially helpful for future things in the game too, like when they eventually have townie story progression, they could program it so that you don’t end up with huge age gap relationships all over town. Just using the life stages, if you say they have to be the “same” age, that could include a Para who is 18, just aged into a young adult and a Para who is like 34, about to age into an Adult. (Which I know does happen plenty in the real world, but I’d worry about it potentially happening at a super high and unrealistic frequency if it was just coded as ‘young adults will only date young adults’

Also another potential use for this could be for job salaries (and honestly I haven’t even tested this, so for all I know this might actually already part of the game)

But if we imagine a Para on a short lifespan, working as a cook let’s say, they make whatever amount per day, but their life goes by so fast they never are able to save up and accrue wealth, whereas a Para with the exact same job and rank, in a savefile with a long lifespan, will be comparatively earning a lot more.

So, they could have jobs programmed with a “yearly” salary, but it’ll only display the daily pay amount, which will be calculated according to your lifespan settings.

So, let’s say a job paid $1000 “yearly”, then for a Para on a short lifespan of like 3 days = year, that will show up as $333 per day. But if you have a longer lifespan of maybe 8 days = year, that same job would show up as $125 /day. And it works out the same relative to the Para’s lifespan.

I don’t know, maybe I’m thinking about it too much. But I’m just so happy to be able to tell my Para’s exact ages way easier than I ever can with my sims.

Bit of a rant here. I know that I can (and I do) use mods for custom age span lengths, but it’s always just bothered me how the default age-lengths make no sense. It’s like no thought went into it at all, and there’s no option to customize it without using third-party mods.

Especially for family gameplay. When I first played sims 4, before I used custom age spans, I’d end up with parents seeming way too old. Especially sims who waited until either later in their young adulthood or their adult years to have kids. They’d be nearly elders when the kids were going into high school.

The default age span for “normal” length is:

Newborn - 1 day
Infant - 5 days
Toddler - 7 days
Child - 14 days
Teen - 21 days
Young Adult - 28 days
Adult - 42 days
Elder - 14 days

Let’s assume that sims are 18 years old when they age into a young adult. If we add up all the ages for newborn through teen, that’s a total of 48 days. So we know 48 sim days is equivalent to 18 years. 48 divided by 18 is 2.67, so now we know that 2.67 sim days is equivalent to 1 year of age.

Now we apply that to the other age spans … they spend 28 days as a young adult, divide that by 2.67, and that’s 10.49 years… so that means they’re 28.49 years old when they age from a young adult into an adult. Honestly “young adult” is subjective so, sure, I can buy that sims are 28.5 years old when they stop being a young adult.

But now they spend 42 days as an Adult, and that’s where this really goes off the rails in my opinion. 42 divided by 2.67 is only 15.73 …. So 15.73 years + 28.5 years = 44.24 years. So, when a sim ages into an elder, they are 44 years old.

You’re telling me that a sim is a grey-haired ELDER before they’re even 45 years old?! That is ridiculous! Oh, and then how long do they live as an elder before they die? 14 days! Which is equivalent to only 5.24 years!! So, sims on the “normal” lifespan live for a grand total of 49.48 years!?! It makes no sense.

And it also applies to the childhood stages. Using the 2.67 days = 1 year, that would mean child-aged sims are 4.86 years old when they age into children, which seems a little too young for how they look, but it’s not too crazy. However, they only spend 14 days (5.24 years) as children, so that means when a sim becomes a teenager, they’re only 10 years old! Which wouldn’t make sense for any of the sims games, but that seems especially wild when Sims 4’s teenagers look particularly old.

And the problem applies to the other lifespan lengths as well. It’s actually even worse on the “long” lifespan, using the same formula of assuming sims are 18 when they age into young adults and dividing the total days by 18 to get length of a year, it works out that sims are 35.9 years old when they age into elders, and then they die of old age at 39😭

Anyway, this is a long rant, but I’m really curious what others think … am I alone in being driven crazy by this? If you use mods for a custom lifespan, what are your preferred settings?