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hat_plays_simsGaguing Interest: Aging Mod
So whenever it gets too hot to sew, I've been putzying away at an aging mod, because I got a bee in my bonnet to learn how. I'm still testing it, and I'm kind of half seeking testers for it, because along with Sim ages... I had to mod ACR. (Old ACR, not the new version. The new version still seems to be in Beta, but I could probably mod it without too many difficulties.
ANYway, it'll be at least a week, probably closer to two, before I'll let myself post this sucker, but would anyone be interested in testing it/downloading it once it's been tested?
We all know Sim pregnancy lasts for three days, right? And human pregnancy lasts for nine months (okay, closer to ten, but nine is the popular count). So one Sim day should equal three human months, right?
I honestly thought that was the way it worked for a while-- babies are babies for three days, nine months is a reasonable infancy. But Sims are only toddlers for four days... so they're starting school at twenty-one months old? The teenage years are the worst for being disproportionate-- Sims are teens for fifteen days but adults for only 28? Man, if I expected my adult years to be only twice as long as my teenage years before I got old and slumpy, I don't know what I'd do. But hey. I ignored it, because I heard somewhere that aging mods conflict with InTeen.
And then Abel6669 posted his Tripled Sim Ages mod and I decided to look into things. I mean, he was firing them off by request left and right, so an aging mod itself couldn't be too hard to figure out, right?
Totally wasn't. And they don't conflict with InTeen. And they don't conflict with ACR, but they do break it. So I went and looked up HOW they broke it and whether or not it could be fixed, which led me to a post on MATY. I was tempted to skip the work and just nab that mod, but... Sixteen days to the year? Yeah, okay, sure, you could assign holidays, but...
Dang.
However, knowing it could be done meant that I could do it.
The proportion is a pretty simple one-- if a pregnancy lasts three days, then three days is nine months. If three days is nine months, then one year is four days.
Maxis ages go thusly:
Infant: 3 Days
Toddler: 4 Days
Child: 8 Days
Teen: 15 Days
Young Adult: 24 Days (discounting three-day post-grad grace period or any academic probation)
Adult: 28 Days
Elder: 9 to 30 Days
Plantbaby: 4 Days
Plantsim: 28 Days
Elder Plantsim: 9 to 30 Days
Puppies and Kittens: 5 Days
Large Dogs: 21 Days
Small Dogs: 25 Days
Cats: 25 Days
I found no info on elder pets, besides 'varies.'
My mod is a little different...
Infant: 4 Days
Toddler: 12 Days
Child: 32 Days
Teen: 24 Days
Young Adult: Unchanged (because otherwise I'd feel rushed through Uni)
Adult: 112 Days
Elder: 12-216 Days
Plantbaby: 24 Days
Plantsim : 112 Days
Elder Plantsim: 4-128 Days
Puppies and Kittens: 4 Days (the only stage that got shorter)
Large Dogs: 32 Days
Small Dogs: 44 Days
Cats: 60 Days
Elder Large Dogs: 8-24 Days
Elder Small Dogs: 8-32 Days
Elder Cats: 8-40 Days
Infancy lasts until the age of one, toddlerhood from age one to age four, childhood from age four to age twelve. I know four is a little young to start school and I can bump that back to five, but I just feel like a four-year-old isn't a toddler anymore. The teen years are from twelve to eighteen, adulthood from eighteen (or twenty-two) to forty-six (or fifty. I'll get back to young adults in a minute), and the Change of Life hits at forty-six (or fifty) and continues until death... which could hit at forty-nine or 104.
Plantbabies get to be little sprouts for six years, but Plantsim adulthood is unchanged (it makes ACR easier that way). Plantsim Elders whither more quickly than regular elders-- depending on their aspiration, they might stick around for a year or for thirty-one years.
I've had cats all my life. I wish kittenhood lasted longer, but you get about a year of them being all tiny and adorable. Adult cats don't start slowing down until around fifteen (which is a bit late but... kitty!), and could live to be seventeen to twenty-five.
Like cats, dogs, large and small, stay puppies for one year. I wish I could've made the large dogs stay puppies longer, as in reality, but... the puppy is an itty bitty thing and then suddenly transforms into this big galoot... No, one year stretches my suspension of disbelief enough. Small dogs get old at age twelve, and don't cross the rainbow bridge (which is the goddamn sappiest thing I've ever read, and I surprised myself by being moved anyway) until age fourteen-- and could make it to age twenty. Large dogs don't live as long as small dogs, so they get old at age nine and could shuffle off their mortal coils anywhere from eleven to fifteen.
I said I'd get back to Young Adults, and here I am. Young Adults count as being on their first day of adulthood through their whole college career, so their age in days has no effect on this mod OR on ACR (the other thing that counts Sims' age-in-days). You could make University as long or short as you wanted and it will have no effect on this mod or ACR. There are two reasons I'm not modding the length of a University career; one, if I decide the length of college isn't right, there's already a 'semesters last 48 hours' mod on MTS, so why reinvent the wheel? Two, I like the three-day semesters. I don't feel rushed, since half the time I'm sending people off to Uni to build adult relationships and whatnot. (Third bonus reason: a little mod called Harder Skills. I'll get to that in a bit.)
So University SHOULD last for six years, but I'm pretending it lasts for four by default, and I'm not counting the three days grace period you get after graduation. It only made any difference in deciding when the adult and elder stages should end, though-- yes, your Sims can live to be 104 years old, if they go to college and live immensely satisfying lives and probably age up in permaplat.
So now let's talk about the ACR half of this mod. See, okay. ACR is set up to count a Sim's age in days, and apply a base chance of autonomous pregnancy-- through either Risky Woohoo or Autonomous Try-For-Baby, but I'm going to keep using the term autonomous pregnancy-- for each day of their fertile life. This chance starts at 70% at twenty-two days old-- eight days before the adult transition, for InTeen compatibility-- and descends until it hits 0% on day fifty and cuts off completely on day 65, six days after elder transition. What's the difference between 0% and cutting off completely? The 0% base chance is just that-- a base chance. There are other factors involved in determining a Sim's chance of autonomous pregnancy, positive and negative.
This is also why ACR and aging mods don't play nice together. None of their code conflicts, but where InTeen's two 'target' ages, 18 (eight days before adult transition) and 40 (five days before elder transition) count backwards from transitions, ACR counts the total days your Sim has been alive from birth. If your aging mod causes your Sims to pass Day 65 somewhere in their youth, their autonomous fertility is... not so autonomous. They'll still whoohoo autonomously, but it won't DO anything.
On top of that, when I discovered the fertility just kind of descended in a straight line, I was displeased. When I plotted out fertility, I plotted an arc. I actually made a graph, so hey. My math teachers were right, I DID need this stuff in real life! (So far I haven't had to find X yet, so my algebra teachers aren't off the hook yet.)
If you use InTeen, with this mod autonomous pregnancy starts at age sixteen, eight days before adult transition, and right in line with InTeen's age eighteen. The base chance of pregnancy at age sixteen is 51%. Peak fertility (70% base chance of autonomous pregnancy, and the highest ACR starts with by default) hits at age twenty-two to age twenty-four-and-a-quarter, which are well into the adult years-- for a non-Uni-grad Sim, adulthood starts at eighteen. (I'll come back to Uni Sims in a minute, again.) But those two and a half years are at the very top of the arc-- it's high from age nineteen and a half to age twenty-six, when it starts to drop sharply. By thirty-five, the base chance reaches 23% and start to drop sharply. By age forty, the odds are at 5% and have leveled out a bit; it isn't until forty-three and three-quarters that the base odds hit 0% (they can still get pregnant, it's just harder). InTeen's Age 40 lands at five days before elder transition, which in this case is forty-four and three-quarters-- you still have a chance for pregnancy if you hurry, but miscarriages become more likely, especially if your Sim has had a miscarriage before. Elder transition is at forty-six, which is not the end of the 0% pregnancy odds (six days past elder transition is, as in unmodded ACR)... but the game won't let your Sims get pregnant anymore anyway, so it might as well be.
It all looks unnecessarily complicated, but human females are less fertile when they first become fertile, become more likely to get pregnant over time, and then as they approach menopause, their chance of pregnancy decreases.
Getting back to Young Adults again, and sort of still on the topic of fertility... The game counts Young Adults, I've said before, as being on their first day of adulthood all through college. An adult on their first day of adulthood as an autonomous pregnancy base chance of 63% with my modded ACR. However, with JUST ACR, this doesn't mean anything, like the fact that teens have an autonomous pregnancy chance at sixteen doesn't mean anything-- without InTeen, only adults can get pregnant.
InTeen, however, brings with it more than just teen pregnancy-- there's the chance of miscarriage, a touch of realism a lot of historic gamers (like me!) want in their games, and support for Young Adult marriage... and pregnancy. Sure, okay, college students probably shouldn't be able to afford a lavish wedding, but they can get married in real life if they want to, right? Of course right. And little accidents can happen to a co-ed just as easily as they can happen to a townie.
The trouble with that is... well, scroll on back up there and look at my numbers for the default Maxis ages. If a Sim and her sweetheart go to college on the same day and she hears those happy little chimes, she's still got twenty-four days of school left. Now, hiring the nanny does work, so there's no worries about missing class. (Worries about what the nanny does, on the other hand...) Three days of pregnancy plus three days of infancy plus four days of toddlerhood plus eight days of childhood is only eighteen days, and any child Sim who transitions to teen while living on a University lot magically becomes a Young Adult, totally missing out on the entirety of their teen years.
With my mod installed, however, that same Sim and her sweetheart can have their happy little accident and graduate with a child of but five-and-a-quarter-- it should be a three-year-old, I admit, but if you want that... there's a mod for 48-hour semesters, like I said, and besides, toddlers and infants sometimes get left behind when the parents move out of Uni houses. It's problematic (although you might just be able to push it until the kid's child transition). Children, so I hear, make it into the cab on their own just fine.
My aging mod adds function, not just time!
There are some other ups and downs of this mod...
Cons:
- If you use this mod, you will NEED Harder Jobs, Harder Skills, Harder Grades, and Slower Aspiration Benefits. You flat out need them, no bones about it, otherwise everything happens way too fast, especially hitting permaplat, which will make your elders live to be a hundred without fail. In fact, if you know of any other Increased Challenge mods, send 'em my way-- I'm not fussed about getting less money, but anything that makes it harder to hit permaplat is a good thing with this mod.
- Seasons end up being fifteen months long, proportionately (five days per season times three months in a day), and one day is just too short for a proper season.
- I gave elders a really long possible lifespan. Like, really long.
- University ages don't match up by default.
- If one is selling the Castaway Stories Elixir of Life in an OFB shop, it is seriously underpriced by default for how powerful it is with this mod. (Prices can be changed in SimPE, though, and something that rockets you back to the first day of your current age group probably ought to cost more than a couple hundred simoleons before setting it to Insanely Overpriced anyway.)
- In an unmodded game, if they start their first day of adulthood and successfully Try For Baby as soon as the grub is born, a Sim can have eight kids, discounting twins; in a with this mod, if they start their first day of adulthood and successfully Try For Baby as soon as the grub is born, a Sim can have 36 kids, discounting twins. (Thankfully, this is just shy of physically impossible in humans-- it actually takes ten months to complete a pregnancy, not nine, so even if you managed to conceive right after giving birth (unlikely but not impossible, take note!), you could only have thirty-two children in twenty-seven years-- if your body didn't give out on you first. Sims' bodies never do.)
- Flavor text as you hover over a Sim's life meter will say '99 days to elder' instead of '24.75 years to elder.' Which is awkward but not something I can fix.
- Pet ages are optimistically realistic, which means they're always too short.
- You may have to give all Sims in the neighborhood new ACR tokens to have the new fertility arc take effect for Sims with lengthened lifespans, which means Sims with regular lifespans get a little messed up in terms of autonomous fertility (so if you're only testing it, try testing it in a new testerhood).
- With Slower Lifetime Aspiration Gain in, your Young Adults' lifetime aspiration meters (those are the ones that came with Free Time and reward you for monumental moments in your Sims' lives, like having a first baby or getting married) actually won't fill at all; this is because EA nerfed Young Adult progress here (otherwise it's a LOAD of aspiration in a short time) and the mod lops that progress down to one-third. (This could be a pro for some; slow lifetime aspiration bars even further by holding off on first kisses and first woohoos until college; try to get engaged or even married there, as well, and nerf that bonus.)
Pros:
- Elixir of Life is de-valued; one keg of it will not now give your Sims half again their adult life back. (One keg has five servings, each serving is three days, for a total of fifteen days-- half the adult lifespan by default, but just shy of four years under my aging. This might count as a con for some.)
- If you're writing or thinking of writing a story-driven legacy instead of a regular legacy, you have more time to get to know your characters without using aging cheats. (Nothing wrong with aging cheats, but for my sake I wanted everything to happen automatically. Other people have awesome systems in place, but I'd lose track if I had to do it all by hand.)
- If you're using a season to mark a round of gameplay-per-household in a neighborhood-wide challenge, children no longer grow up at weirdly-staggered rates.
- Sims are now children for longer than they are teenagers, which is a much more natural state of affairs.
- Family Sims can now have ten children or graduate six children from college or breed twenty kittens or puppies without cheating their ages, snorfing down cheesecake every time they get knocked up, or starting to breed as teenagers. (It's humanly possible to have ten kids between 18 and 46, after all.)
- Romance Sims can have fifty first dates without having to have an average of two dates per day.
- By the time adults are ready to age up it's quite possible for a player to be willing to let them grow old gracefully instead of diving for the elixir keg, the Castaway cauldron, or feeding a hapless townie to the cowplant.
- There is plenty of time for Sims to try things; go on vacations, throw parties, go on dates, build home businesses, have five top-level businesses (own the whole town, Mr. McDuck!), breed pets, move house now and then, and basically have lives beyond skill, badge, work, breed.
- It is oddly refreshing to have time to play with toddlers rather than just forcing them to eat, sleep, and skill.
- Kids, too, have time to play instead of just racking up the skill points. It's entirely feasible to USE some of those cute dollhouses, teddy bears, and toy boxes we download!
- Except for those households where trying desperately for that male heir-and-a-spare makes in-character sense, I should never have to tell my Sims to Try For Baby.
- With Harder Skills in, you will feel like your teens have really EARNED those scholarships.
So, questions...
Would anybody be interested in proportionate ages besides me? Is there anything I need to warn for with aging mods (besides that there can be only one)? Does anyone know how aging mods affect Bigfoot?
And perhaps most importantly, is there anybody out there who might want to help me test this mod (especially if I can contact you over PM here or at GoS or even MTS or via email, because I am nowhere near ready to release this publicly)? Particularly people with different game configurations than me (I have all EPs/SPs) or who don't use InTeen, or who have Sims lying around almost ready to age to Elder without stupid high Aspiration levels?
So whenever it gets too hot to sew, I've been putzying away at an aging mod, because I got a bee in my bonnet to learn how. I'm still testing it, and I'm kind of half seeking testers for it, because along with Sim ages... I had to mod ACR. (Old ACR, not the new version. The new version still seems to be in Beta, but I could probably mod it without too many difficulties.
ANYway, it'll be at least a week, probably closer to two, before I'll let myself post this sucker, but would anyone be interested in testing it/downloading it once it's been tested?
We all know Sim pregnancy lasts for three days, right? And human pregnancy lasts for nine months (okay, closer to ten, but nine is the popular count). So one Sim day should equal three human months, right?
I honestly thought that was the way it worked for a while-- babies are babies for three days, nine months is a reasonable infancy. But Sims are only toddlers for four days... so they're starting school at twenty-one months old? The teenage years are the worst for being disproportionate-- Sims are teens for fifteen days but adults for only 28? Man, if I expected my adult years to be only twice as long as my teenage years before I got old and slumpy, I don't know what I'd do. But hey. I ignored it, because I heard somewhere that aging mods conflict with InTeen.
And then Abel6669 posted his Tripled Sim Ages mod and I decided to look into things. I mean, he was firing them off by request left and right, so an aging mod itself couldn't be too hard to figure out, right?
Totally wasn't. And they don't conflict with InTeen. And they don't conflict with ACR, but they do break it. So I went and looked up HOW they broke it and whether or not it could be fixed, which led me to a post on MATY. I was tempted to skip the work and just nab that mod, but... Sixteen days to the year? Yeah, okay, sure, you could assign holidays, but...
Dang.
However, knowing it could be done meant that I could do it.
The proportion is a pretty simple one-- if a pregnancy lasts three days, then three days is nine months. If three days is nine months, then one year is four days.
Maxis ages go thusly:
Infant: 3 Days
Toddler: 4 Days
Child: 8 Days
Teen: 15 Days
Young Adult: 24 Days (discounting three-day post-grad grace period or any academic probation)
Adult: 28 Days
Elder: 9 to 30 Days
Plantbaby: 4 Days
Plantsim: 28 Days
Elder Plantsim: 9 to 30 Days
Puppies and Kittens: 5 Days
Large Dogs: 21 Days
Small Dogs: 25 Days
Cats: 25 Days
I found no info on elder pets, besides 'varies.'
My mod is a little different...
Infant: 4 Days
Toddler: 12 Days
Child: 32 Days
Teen: 24 Days
Young Adult: Unchanged (because otherwise I'd feel rushed through Uni)
Adult: 112 Days
Elder: 12-216 Days
Plantbaby: 24 Days
Plantsim : 112 Days
Elder Plantsim: 4-128 Days
Puppies and Kittens: 4 Days (the only stage that got shorter)
Large Dogs: 32 Days
Small Dogs: 44 Days
Cats: 60 Days
Elder Large Dogs: 8-24 Days
Elder Small Dogs: 8-32 Days
Elder Cats: 8-40 Days
Infancy lasts until the age of one, toddlerhood from age one to age four, childhood from age four to age twelve. I know four is a little young to start school and I can bump that back to five, but I just feel like a four-year-old isn't a toddler anymore. The teen years are from twelve to eighteen, adulthood from eighteen (or twenty-two) to forty-six (or fifty. I'll get back to young adults in a minute), and the Change of Life hits at forty-six (or fifty) and continues until death... which could hit at forty-nine or 104.
Plantbabies get to be little sprouts for six years, but Plantsim adulthood is unchanged (it makes ACR easier that way). Plantsim Elders whither more quickly than regular elders-- depending on their aspiration, they might stick around for a year or for thirty-one years.
I've had cats all my life. I wish kittenhood lasted longer, but you get about a year of them being all tiny and adorable. Adult cats don't start slowing down until around fifteen (which is a bit late but... kitty!), and could live to be seventeen to twenty-five.
Like cats, dogs, large and small, stay puppies for one year. I wish I could've made the large dogs stay puppies longer, as in reality, but... the puppy is an itty bitty thing and then suddenly transforms into this big galoot... No, one year stretches my suspension of disbelief enough. Small dogs get old at age twelve, and don't cross the rainbow bridge (which is the goddamn sappiest thing I've ever read, and I surprised myself by being moved anyway) until age fourteen-- and could make it to age twenty. Large dogs don't live as long as small dogs, so they get old at age nine and could shuffle off their mortal coils anywhere from eleven to fifteen.
I said I'd get back to Young Adults, and here I am. Young Adults count as being on their first day of adulthood through their whole college career, so their age in days has no effect on this mod OR on ACR (the other thing that counts Sims' age-in-days). You could make University as long or short as you wanted and it will have no effect on this mod or ACR. There are two reasons I'm not modding the length of a University career; one, if I decide the length of college isn't right, there's already a 'semesters last 48 hours' mod on MTS, so why reinvent the wheel? Two, I like the three-day semesters. I don't feel rushed, since half the time I'm sending people off to Uni to build adult relationships and whatnot. (Third bonus reason: a little mod called Harder Skills. I'll get to that in a bit.)
So University SHOULD last for six years, but I'm pretending it lasts for four by default, and I'm not counting the three days grace period you get after graduation. It only made any difference in deciding when the adult and elder stages should end, though-- yes, your Sims can live to be 104 years old, if they go to college and live immensely satisfying lives and probably age up in permaplat.
So now let's talk about the ACR half of this mod. See, okay. ACR is set up to count a Sim's age in days, and apply a base chance of autonomous pregnancy-- through either Risky Woohoo or Autonomous Try-For-Baby, but I'm going to keep using the term autonomous pregnancy-- for each day of their fertile life. This chance starts at 70% at twenty-two days old-- eight days before the adult transition, for InTeen compatibility-- and descends until it hits 0% on day fifty and cuts off completely on day 65, six days after elder transition. What's the difference between 0% and cutting off completely? The 0% base chance is just that-- a base chance. There are other factors involved in determining a Sim's chance of autonomous pregnancy, positive and negative.
This is also why ACR and aging mods don't play nice together. None of their code conflicts, but where InTeen's two 'target' ages, 18 (eight days before adult transition) and 40 (five days before elder transition) count backwards from transitions, ACR counts the total days your Sim has been alive from birth. If your aging mod causes your Sims to pass Day 65 somewhere in their youth, their autonomous fertility is... not so autonomous. They'll still whoohoo autonomously, but it won't DO anything.
On top of that, when I discovered the fertility just kind of descended in a straight line, I was displeased. When I plotted out fertility, I plotted an arc. I actually made a graph, so hey. My math teachers were right, I DID need this stuff in real life! (So far I haven't had to find X yet, so my algebra teachers aren't off the hook yet.)
If you use InTeen, with this mod autonomous pregnancy starts at age sixteen, eight days before adult transition, and right in line with InTeen's age eighteen. The base chance of pregnancy at age sixteen is 51%. Peak fertility (70% base chance of autonomous pregnancy, and the highest ACR starts with by default) hits at age twenty-two to age twenty-four-and-a-quarter, which are well into the adult years-- for a non-Uni-grad Sim, adulthood starts at eighteen. (I'll come back to Uni Sims in a minute, again.) But those two and a half years are at the very top of the arc-- it's high from age nineteen and a half to age twenty-six, when it starts to drop sharply. By thirty-five, the base chance reaches 23% and start to drop sharply. By age forty, the odds are at 5% and have leveled out a bit; it isn't until forty-three and three-quarters that the base odds hit 0% (they can still get pregnant, it's just harder). InTeen's Age 40 lands at five days before elder transition, which in this case is forty-four and three-quarters-- you still have a chance for pregnancy if you hurry, but miscarriages become more likely, especially if your Sim has had a miscarriage before. Elder transition is at forty-six, which is not the end of the 0% pregnancy odds (six days past elder transition is, as in unmodded ACR)... but the game won't let your Sims get pregnant anymore anyway, so it might as well be.
It all looks unnecessarily complicated, but human females are less fertile when they first become fertile, become more likely to get pregnant over time, and then as they approach menopause, their chance of pregnancy decreases.
Getting back to Young Adults again, and sort of still on the topic of fertility... The game counts Young Adults, I've said before, as being on their first day of adulthood all through college. An adult on their first day of adulthood as an autonomous pregnancy base chance of 63% with my modded ACR. However, with JUST ACR, this doesn't mean anything, like the fact that teens have an autonomous pregnancy chance at sixteen doesn't mean anything-- without InTeen, only adults can get pregnant.
InTeen, however, brings with it more than just teen pregnancy-- there's the chance of miscarriage, a touch of realism a lot of historic gamers (like me!) want in their games, and support for Young Adult marriage... and pregnancy. Sure, okay, college students probably shouldn't be able to afford a lavish wedding, but they can get married in real life if they want to, right? Of course right. And little accidents can happen to a co-ed just as easily as they can happen to a townie.
The trouble with that is... well, scroll on back up there and look at my numbers for the default Maxis ages. If a Sim and her sweetheart go to college on the same day and she hears those happy little chimes, she's still got twenty-four days of school left. Now, hiring the nanny does work, so there's no worries about missing class. (Worries about what the nanny does, on the other hand...) Three days of pregnancy plus three days of infancy plus four days of toddlerhood plus eight days of childhood is only eighteen days, and any child Sim who transitions to teen while living on a University lot magically becomes a Young Adult, totally missing out on the entirety of their teen years.
With my mod installed, however, that same Sim and her sweetheart can have their happy little accident and graduate with a child of but five-and-a-quarter-- it should be a three-year-old, I admit, but if you want that... there's a mod for 48-hour semesters, like I said, and besides, toddlers and infants sometimes get left behind when the parents move out of Uni houses. It's problematic (although you might just be able to push it until the kid's child transition). Children, so I hear, make it into the cab on their own just fine.
My aging mod adds function, not just time!
There are some other ups and downs of this mod...
Cons:
- If you use this mod, you will NEED Harder Jobs, Harder Skills, Harder Grades, and Slower Aspiration Benefits. You flat out need them, no bones about it, otherwise everything happens way too fast, especially hitting permaplat, which will make your elders live to be a hundred without fail. In fact, if you know of any other Increased Challenge mods, send 'em my way-- I'm not fussed about getting less money, but anything that makes it harder to hit permaplat is a good thing with this mod.
- Seasons end up being fifteen months long, proportionately (five days per season times three months in a day), and one day is just too short for a proper season.
- I gave elders a really long possible lifespan. Like, really long.
- University ages don't match up by default.
- If one is selling the Castaway Stories Elixir of Life in an OFB shop, it is seriously underpriced by default for how powerful it is with this mod. (Prices can be changed in SimPE, though, and something that rockets you back to the first day of your current age group probably ought to cost more than a couple hundred simoleons before setting it to Insanely Overpriced anyway.)
- In an unmodded game, if they start their first day of adulthood and successfully Try For Baby as soon as the grub is born, a Sim can have eight kids, discounting twins; in a with this mod, if they start their first day of adulthood and successfully Try For Baby as soon as the grub is born, a Sim can have 36 kids, discounting twins. (Thankfully, this is just shy of physically impossible in humans-- it actually takes ten months to complete a pregnancy, not nine, so even if you managed to conceive right after giving birth (unlikely but not impossible, take note!), you could only have thirty-two children in twenty-seven years-- if your body didn't give out on you first. Sims' bodies never do.)
- Flavor text as you hover over a Sim's life meter will say '99 days to elder' instead of '24.75 years to elder.' Which is awkward but not something I can fix.
- Pet ages are optimistically realistic, which means they're always too short.
- You may have to give all Sims in the neighborhood new ACR tokens to have the new fertility arc take effect for Sims with lengthened lifespans, which means Sims with regular lifespans get a little messed up in terms of autonomous fertility (so if you're only testing it, try testing it in a new testerhood).
- With Slower Lifetime Aspiration Gain in, your Young Adults' lifetime aspiration meters (those are the ones that came with Free Time and reward you for monumental moments in your Sims' lives, like having a first baby or getting married) actually won't fill at all; this is because EA nerfed Young Adult progress here (otherwise it's a LOAD of aspiration in a short time) and the mod lops that progress down to one-third. (This could be a pro for some; slow lifetime aspiration bars even further by holding off on first kisses and first woohoos until college; try to get engaged or even married there, as well, and nerf that bonus.)
Pros:
- Elixir of Life is de-valued; one keg of it will not now give your Sims half again their adult life back. (One keg has five servings, each serving is three days, for a total of fifteen days-- half the adult lifespan by default, but just shy of four years under my aging. This might count as a con for some.)
- If you're writing or thinking of writing a story-driven legacy instead of a regular legacy, you have more time to get to know your characters without using aging cheats. (Nothing wrong with aging cheats, but for my sake I wanted everything to happen automatically. Other people have awesome systems in place, but I'd lose track if I had to do it all by hand.)
- If you're using a season to mark a round of gameplay-per-household in a neighborhood-wide challenge, children no longer grow up at weirdly-staggered rates.
- Sims are now children for longer than they are teenagers, which is a much more natural state of affairs.
- Family Sims can now have ten children or graduate six children from college or breed twenty kittens or puppies without cheating their ages, snorfing down cheesecake every time they get knocked up, or starting to breed as teenagers. (It's humanly possible to have ten kids between 18 and 46, after all.)
- Romance Sims can have fifty first dates without having to have an average of two dates per day.
- By the time adults are ready to age up it's quite possible for a player to be willing to let them grow old gracefully instead of diving for the elixir keg, the Castaway cauldron, or feeding a hapless townie to the cowplant.
- There is plenty of time for Sims to try things; go on vacations, throw parties, go on dates, build home businesses, have five top-level businesses (own the whole town, Mr. McDuck!), breed pets, move house now and then, and basically have lives beyond skill, badge, work, breed.
- It is oddly refreshing to have time to play with toddlers rather than just forcing them to eat, sleep, and skill.
- Kids, too, have time to play instead of just racking up the skill points. It's entirely feasible to USE some of those cute dollhouses, teddy bears, and toy boxes we download!
- Except for those households where trying desperately for that male heir-and-a-spare makes in-character sense, I should never have to tell my Sims to Try For Baby.
- With Harder Skills in, you will feel like your teens have really EARNED those scholarships.
So, questions...
Would anybody be interested in proportionate ages besides me? Is there anything I need to warn for with aging mods (besides that there can be only one)? Does anyone know how aging mods affect Bigfoot?
And perhaps most importantly, is there anybody out there who might want to help me test this mod (especially if I can contact you over PM here or at GoS or even MTS or via email, because I am nowhere near ready to release this publicly)? Particularly people with different game configurations than me (I have all EPs/SPs) or who don't use InTeen, or who have Sims lying around almost ready to age to Elder without stupid high Aspiration levels?
