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hat_plays_simsIt's not that Sims don't live long enough. There are zillions of ways to extend Sims' lifespans, even without hacks-- aging off, elixir of life, murdering hapless townies with your pet abomination of dairy and consuming their essence-- so it's not so much that I want my Sims' lives to be longer.
I want my Sims' lives to make sense.
"Don't get me wrong, it's the proportion. I love the breadth, it's the length. Now, she may be the right length, but is she right for me?"
-- Pseudolus, the lyingest, cheatingest, sloppiest slave in all Rome, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Sim lifespans are all funky.
Pregnancy lasts for three days. Infancy for three days. Toddlerhood for four days. Childhood for eight days, the teen years for fifteen days. If you go off to college, that's another twenty-four days, adulthood itself lasts for twenty-nine days whether you go to college or not, and you can be a senior citizen for as little as nine days or as much as thirty.
What the hell is that hot mess? You're a teenager for half the length of your adult years, your university career is only two days shorter than it will take you to reach retirement age, and childhood is over in a relative blink of an eye?
There's no sense of proportion, besides roughly doubling each age when you hit the next-- okay, reasonably, infancy could last as long as pregnancy, but if pregnancy is nine months, Sim kids start school at the age of... twenty-one months? And whose adolescence lasted twice as long as their childhood?
I decided to scrap that and start over.
The popular count says that pregnancy lasts for nine months, each trimester being three months long. Sim pregnancy lines up neatly wth that, lasting for three days with each trimester lasting approximately one Sim day. I don't know how to change it, and it makes enough sense that I didn't want to change it.
So! There's my base proportion-- if three days is nine months, then one day is three months, and one year is four days.
I took that and ran with it. If you decide to use my aging mod, this is how the ages play out:
Sims
Baby: Birth to One Year, 4 days (EAxis, 3 days)
Toddler: Age One to Age Four, 12 days (EAxis, 4 days)
Child: Age Four to Age Twelve, 32 days (Eaxis, 8 days)
Teen: Age Twelve to Age Eighteen, 24 days (EAxis, 15 days)
Young Adult: Unchanged from Maxis, 24 days
Adult: Age Eighteen to Age Forty-Six, 112 days (EAxis, 29 days)
Elder: Age Forty-Six to Death (from 49-100), 12-216 days (EAxis, 9-30 days)
Plantsims
Plantbabies: "Birth" to Age Six, 24 days (EAxis, 3 days)
Plantsims: Age Six to Age Thirty-Four, 112 days (EAxis, 29 days)
Plantsim Elders: Age Thirty-Four to Death (from 35-62), 4-128 days (EAxis, 9-30 days)
Pets
Puppies and Kittens: Birth to One Year, 4 days (EAxis, 5 days)
Large Dogs: Age One to Age Nine, 32 days (EAxis, 21 days)
Elder Large Dogs: Age Nine to Death (11-15), 8-24 days
Small Dogs: Age One to Age Twelve, 44 Days (EAxis, 25)
Elder Small Dog: Age Twelve to Death (14-20), 8-32 days
Cat: Age One to Age Fifteen, 60 days (EAxis, 25)
Elder Cat: Age Fifteen to Death (17-25), 8-40 days
I couldn't find any information on how long EAxis pets stay elders other than 'varies.' I double checked all my notes, which are copious.
(The images for this mod are almost entirely random.)
And a few points of clarification there, yes, kids start school at four years old, which is a mite young-- but not so young that it's implausible. Besides, I just can't look at a Sims 2 toddler as a four year old.
I only gave Plantsim lifespans in years for spawned Plantsims (rather than regular Sims who have been turned into Plantsims); it's simpler that way. Adult Plantsims get the same number of days as adult Sims, again because it's easier and to work with fertility (I'll explain that later). Plantsims have such a short elder lifespan because I really wanted that life state to have a consequence; I like Plantsims way too much to have the only downside be "Well, some people are turned off by them." It seemed fairly reasonable-- if a plant gets too old to bear fruit, it's probably about ready to die.
I really, really wanted to have large dogs stay puppies for more than a year, as in real life (well, they grow, but they're puppies in their brains), but it's the same suspension of disbelief thing that had me sending four-year-olds to kindergarten. Small and large puppies are the same size, so all of a sudden this itty bitty wiggly puppy is this great big galoot of a dog? What?
And then there's the Young Adult thing. There are a couple of reasons I didn't decide to mod the length of University.
One, I like it the length it is. Two, there's already a perfectly functional 48-hour semester mod. So if a six-year University term (that I nevertheless decided to count as four years) bothers you, you can always grab that. Three, well, three has to do with juggling University and InTeen, which allows for Young Adult pregnancy. More on that later.
The benefit to having Sims' lives this long is that you really get to know them; you might not be diving for the Elixir of Life every time you get that "So and So's Birthday is in just two days!" popup to save your favorite Sims from getting old and slumpy. If you're writing a story-driven legacy, you have time to get to know your characters before they grow up, grow old, and die. On top of that, you have time to try things you've never done before-- get a top-level business, hunt down all the vacation mementos, breed pets-- because individual Sims' lives are no longer utterly consumed by grind skills, go to work/school, eat, sleep, breed.
Oh, and your kids? They'll have time to play. That's right. No more only giving them decorative toys or steering the little rugrats away from the dollhouse. Having fun is not a waste of time anymore!
(He's got his father's nose and his mother's ears.)
The trouble, however, is that age duration mods are incompatible with TwoJeffs' Autonomous Casual Romance, one of the single most marvelous mods out there. They don't conflict, as they don't modify any of the same code, but ACR counts a Sim's age in days to calculate their autonomous pregnancy chance. If a Sim is over sixty-five days old, risky woohoo isn't risky and autonomous try-for-baby never happens.
Other than that, ACR works fine, but one of the great things about ACR is that it lets the Sims decide when to breed, instead of leaving it solely in the player's hands. That's one of the things I like most about ACR-- I can leave my Sims unattended and they'll go fool around on their own, because they want to.
I figured my options were an age duration mod or ACR until I happened upon this thread on MATY... and decided to mod ACR. If it could be done once, I figured it could be done again.
ACR version 1.10.10 is supported-- if something screws up, let me know, and I'll try and fix it. the ACR version 2 beta is... semi-supported. I don't have Version 2, because I'm waiting for it to be out of beta, but I have modded the appropriate file for both 2.5b and 2.5c. If something goes wrong, let me know and I'll try and fix it... but you'll have to test it, O brave downloader, because I'm not ready to upgrade yet.
But what the whole ACR thing let me do, practically, was create a fertility arc. See, ACR introduces declining fertility to your Sims; Maxis coding has a Sim five days away from becoming an elder have the same chance of pregnancy that a Sim on her first day as an adult does. ACR starts Sims off with high fertility that continually drops over a Sim's lifetime-- although it only applies to ACR's Risky Woohoo and autonomous try-for-baby interactions, so you can still have your peri-menopausal ladies catch pregnant by deliberately trying the Maxis way.
Which is awesome, but if I'm adding realism (in terms of proportion, anyway), why not add some more? I mean, I already had to mod that bit.
(Dude, I don't think she's going for it.)
ACR is InTeen compatible, which means that autonomous fertility starts at InTeen's 'sweet eighteen,' eight days before the adult transition (if you have vanilla InTeen installed, this is the age where teens can get adult jobs and move out on their own while remaining teenagers). ACR's base chance of pregnancy for a Sim at Sweet Eighteen is 70%, the highest chance they'll ever get. (This chance is modified by a ton of other things that I didn't futz with. You can also increase or decrease the odds manually in game.)
I looked it up. That's not when peak fertility hits human females. On top of that, using my math for this mod, eight days before the adult transition is sixteen, not eighteen. I don't have a problem with the whole young-mother thing, since my game is Medieval and crossbow (too early for shotguns) weddings have a certain appeal, but those odds were a smidge high for my liking.
Using my ages, fertility over time breaks down like this: teen Sims become autonomously fertile (as in, they can decide for themselves when to woohoo and/or try for baby) at age sixteen, with a 51% base chance of pregnancy, if you have InTeen, ACR, and my mod installed. Without InTeen, fertility hits with the adult transition, as usual, at age eighteen with a 63% base chance. Female Sims hit the top of their fertility arc at age twenty-two-- 70%, just like the highest fertility in Original Recipe ACR-- which lasts until twenty-four and a quarter. Things still stay pretty high until age twenty-six, and then starts the downward swing of the arc. By thirty-five, the base chance reaches 23% and begins to drop sharply. By age forty, base odds are at just 5% and have leveled out a little; it isn't until age forty-three and three-quarters that the base odds hit 0% (autonomous pregnancy is still possible at this point! There are plenty of other modifiers built in, these are just the base odds). InTeen's Age 40 is five days before elder transition, which in this case is forty-four and three-quarters-- which means that InTeen users can still get their Sims pregnant if they hurry, but the chances of miscarriage increase (especially for Sims who have had previous miscarriages). Elder transition is at forty-six, which is not the end of the 0% pregnancy odds (as in unmodded ACR, that's six days past Elder transition-- why? I dunno, but it seemed safest to stick with what TwoJeffs did), but the game won't let your Sims get pregnant anymore anyway, so it might as well be.
It all looks needlessly complicated, but human females are less fertile at menarche, become more likely to get pregnant over time as their menstrual cycles even out, and then as they approach menopause, their chance of pregnancy decreases. I wanted that for my Sims, not a straight line from Really Fertile to Not Fertile At All. (I drew a graph for this to help me find the numbers for each day, you guys. For serious. I actually needed something from seventh-grade math class!)
(She got her father's nose and her mother's ears, too. And Mom's skin. Dad's skin is because he's a warlock.)
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 controller. 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 Young Adult 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 non-collegiate.
The trouble with that is... well, scroll on back up there and look at my numbers for the default Maxis ages. If a Sim fools around with her sweetheart on the first day of college and 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. Our co-ed's child will be a teenager before Momma graduates college in what's supposed to be four-to-sixish years. That makes absolutely no sense.
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. (If you have a breeding family in a rental home, I will say that having the full twenty-four days of college makes everything lots easier, because you have enough time to get reasonable grades, teach all those toddler skills, and crank out a few paintings or restaurant guides or novels to keep up with the bills.)
(Does that hourglass exist as clutter? My day would be made.)
Now that I've talked about kids, teenagers, fertility, and Young Adults, it's probably time to talk about elders.
Man, Simmers hate elders. I can kinda get it, suddenly your perky young fit Sims have turned into these slumping hunchbacked shamblers who have to get up in the middle of the night to pee and only have gray hair in their bin by default and can only get stunted jobs.
But, listen, living things age. It happens. It's a scary change, like puberty, but it's totally natural. You don't have to hate it. In fact, after a hundred and twelve days of adulthood, you might actually be ready for it when it happens to your Sims.
But dang, did I have to make the elder stage potentially last so long? Twelve to two-hundred-sixteen days is kind of a wide spread...
Because such wide spreads happen in reality. Sometimes people drop dead at the age of 49-- if it seems too young for Old Age to claim your Sims, tell the story and call it a stroke or a heart attack. Sometimes people live to be a hundred years old. The average lifespan for a healthy human being is somewhere around 72 years, and that's about what it is for Sims under this mod. (So why do they get old and gray at only 46? Because of a limitation in ACR which meant that I couldn't effectively extend fertility past a certain point without figuring out how to work with multipliers in BHAVs, and I was kind of scared to do that. I also really wanted the ACR fertility cutoff point to be after the elder transition, as in the original ACR. Paranoia and knowing my own limitations, I guess.)
With the various bonuses and detriments for aspiration and the random factor involved in Sim elders' remaining years, your Sims could drop dead of old age at literally any time after having been elders for twelve days. They get one significant random factor, plus bonuses based on their aspiration level when they age up. If you want to be sure your Sim will live a long, long time, max out that aspiration meter right before their elder transition. Want to be rid of them quickly? Try and arrange a red meter. In testing in my game, my youngest death comes at age 56, and my oldest at age 96. Most Sims who were green or gold at the time they aged up wound up with an expiration date in their 70s... Which is about average for death by old age. (You can always arrange it so something else kills them first, you know.)
(... I really did not intend for it to look like Lord Lankin and his wolfy buddy should be the something else you arrange to kill your elders.)
Okay, so now we've talked about what the mod does; let's talk about how to get it working correctly, and how to use it.
New age lengths will apply to new Sims fresh out of CAS or Sims born after the aging mod is installed. Existing Sims will either have to wait for their next age transition for the mod to take effect. (You can always use Boolprop cheats to age them up and then down again.) All aging mods work this way; it's not really something I can fix.
If you're installing a tweaked ACR controller, too, you will have to remove and re-give everyone's tokens to trigger the fertility changes. The in-game ACR controller has an option to do this, although it may take a little while if your neighborhood is full of Sims or your computer is slow.
EDIT: In regards to ACR Version 2, there is no way to remove and re-give Sims' tokens after resetting their ages, but to get the same effect in regards to autonomous fertility, you should reset ACR to the default. Other than that, aging them up or down and back again and using SimPE, SimBlender, or drinking Elixir of Life while in red or green aspiration to get your Sims back to the correct point in their lifespan does work!
There are five files in the download; you need no more than three of them. Three shall be the number of the counting and the number shall be three. Count ye to two only under certain circumstances, never unto four, and five is right out.
Sim and Plantsim ages and pet ages are separate files; you can use one, the other, or both. If you don't use ACR, that's all you need. Install them in your downloads folder. Do not use with other age duration mods unless you're downloading a semester-length mod; that mod should probably load after mine. (Shouldn't be hard, my name is Almighty Hat and my file names start with [, so almost anything that doesn't start with ( will come first.)
There are four versions of the ACR main controller: 1.10.10, 2.5b, 2.5c (still available) and v2 Final. "Final" is the final release of ACR 2.0; 1.10.10 is the final release of ACR 1.0. You can only choose ONE of these and it has to correspond exactly to your current version of ACR. Knowing which version of ACR you're using is your responsibility; if you downloaded your version of ACR here, you probably want the 1.10.10 version; if you downloaded your version of ACR here, instead, you need either 2.5c or v2 Final. If you have a lower version of ACR 2.0, I can probably update it if you send me the controller file, but it's probably better for you to update your ACR. Put ONLY the appropriate file in your downloads folder and REMOVE the file called ACR - Controller - Main, just to be on the safe side. (Do not delete it. Just remove it. Put it on your desktop or something.)
Okay, let me outline a few pros and cons to this whole mess and we'll move on to downloads and recommended side mods.
(If a Plantsim is chased by bees, is it sexual harassment?)
Cons
You will need some increased-challenge mods, if you don't want all your Sims to be super skilled, super wealthy, permanently platinum demigods by the time they're in junior high.
Seasons (if you have Seasons installed) end up being fifteen months long by default. The only way to make Seasons proportional to an aging mod would be to download something like the Seasonal Aging Mod from MATY I linked to, where one year equals twenty days, or by shortening the seasons so much that weather doesn't really have any time to accumulate.
If you're running the kind of challenge where you have to whip through Sim generations relatively quickly, this mod will be of no use to you.
If you have a Sim selling the Castway Stories Elixir of Life in an OFB shop, it is seriously undervalued by default for how powerful this mod makes it (considering it rockets Sims all the way back to the first day of their current life stage).
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 know how to fix.
Your Mileage May Vary
Elixir of Life is no longer of inflated value: thirty-two thousand aspiration points buys fifteen days of life. In an unmodded game, that's half the adult lifespan if one Sim drinks all of it. With my mod installed, it's three years and nine months. Likewise, using the Elixir in green or red aspiration only takes a small portion of a Sim's life away.
In an unmodded game, if a Sim gets knocked up their first day of adulthood and successfully Tries For Baby as soon as the grub is born, repeating the process after each birth, a Sim can have eight kids, discounting twins and Elixir of Life; with this mod, if a Sim gets knocked up their first day of adulthood and successfully Tries For Baby as soon as the grub is born, repeating the process after each birth one Sim can have 35 kids, discounting twins. (Frighteningly, this is just shy of physically impossible in humans-- it actually takes closer to ten months to complete a pregnancy, not nine (or rather, nine months and ten days; Sim pregnancies take 75 hours), 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.)
Aging mod plus ACR controller designed to function properly with aging mod plus too many 'no autonomous X' mods tends to equal Sims who, left to their own devices, woohoo kind of a lot. Upside, you no longer have to order them to do it if they like each other enough. Downside, it is easily possible to have houses with three siblings under the age of four.
Pros
If you're running or thinking of running a story-driven legacy, you have more time to get to know your characters without having to cheat their ages. (Nothing against cheating ages, but it's easier if it happens automatically, right?)
Family Sims can feasibly have ten children or raise twenty puppies or kittens without extending their lifespans or (if you use a mod that enables teen pregnancy) starting as teenagers. Likewise, Romance Sims can now have fifty first dates and still have a shot at settling down after they finish sowing their wild, wild oats.
Sims have time to try things-- go on more dates, throw parties, take vacations, and basically have lives beyond skill, badge, work, breed. The toddler age, specifically, is long enough that there isn't really any need to grind toddler skills-- they can eat, sleep, have a few baths, and play. It's even possible to get a toddler all their toddler skills and a few regular skill points before they age up to child without use of Smart Milk AND while using a Harder Skills mod.
Well, I'm out of pictures, so it must be time to download. Let me first thank...
TwoJeffs for ACR and all the awesomeness it brings, Tom Dumahel, Abel6669, and Lientebollemeis on MTS for their aging mods, which I took apart to learn how to make my own, Awrevell on MATY for the Seasonal Aging Mod that proved ACR and aging mods can play well together if you cooperate, Quaxi for SimPE, without which nothing much would be possible, to my beta testers Kinsley, Eva, Aquilegia, Lyndira, Cassandra, Meshy, Astral Faery, Sparrow, and I thiiiiiink that's everybody.
And now,
DOWNLOAD GESTATION-BASED AGING: TYPO REPAIR EDITION! On Mediafire | On Sims File Share
DO NOT DOWNLOAD THE OTHER TWO! They're here for posterity, or maybe if you have a non-final version of ACR to fix yourself. Thanks to a comment by Eisbaer, here, several ten-year-old typos have been revealed to me, which will cut off fertility early. If you downloaded It's The Proportion at any time before January 4, 2022, please redownload (you will have to manually replace your ACR Main package, the updated ones have different file names.)
DOWNLOAD GESTATION-BASED AGING for ACR V1 FINAL! on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD GESTATION-BASED AGING for ACR V2 FINAL FINAL! on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
If you have a non-final version of ACRv2 you want to edit yourself, Eisbaer's invaluable instructions are as follows:
In the BHAV Token-Sub-Calculate Pregnancy Odds, "node 4 needs to contain the largest number you used in the BCON table. Here 190 (but in hex, so BE). Node 5 contains the ID of that last BCON line, here 126 (in hex 7E). In my SimPe is a small crossed-hammer-button on the lower right-hand side that helps to convert decimal to hex numbers when you click on it.
And node 2 and node 6 contain the lowest number of days you set. Here 64. This is important so the correct line in the BCON will be read from. e.g, you are 67 days old, so line 3 contains the fertility for 67 days. 67 days in the token minus node 6 (64) equals 3 (aka BCON line 3). Almighty your file subtracts 63 and would jump to the wrong line in the BCON."
So there you go. Thank you so much, Eisbaer, I would literally never have caught those issues.
There are written instructions in the zip file, remember not to install them (text files slow your loading. I'd've included a picture, but you have to keep your backup ACR - Controller - Main file somewhere, too).
I've also included this list of suggested side mods in the download, but you know what? Let's put them here, too. Because with increased lifespans come some difficulties like... Free Time induced permaplat states happening while Sims are children-- or while plantsims are toddlers.
Optional but Helpful Side Mods
Plantbaby Changes by Cyjon
Plantbabies only get half the skills of the parent Sim, Nature enthusiasm is maxed (with FT), and genetic personality is set correctly. Give those plantsim kids something to really work at!
Slower Lifetime Aspiration Benefits in Free Time by Doc Doofus
Cuts accumulation of Lifetime Aspiration points by one-third, reducing the likelihood of hitting permaplat state somewhere in toddlerhood. Eliminates accumulation of Lifetime Aspiration points in college entirely, because EAxis already had it so low.
Fragile Permaplat by Cyjon
A big enough fear can, in fact, break your Sims' permaplat status, reducing the annoyance of toddlers in permaplat with Free Time.
Realistic Ages: Harder Skill Learning by Lientebollemeis (Removed from MTS by Lientebollemeis, who has moved to TSR (though these mods are free there) and opened a blog, but you can grab the skill-building mods here, at Lientebollemeis's request. If the link doesn't work for you, try back in a few hours or with another browser.
Adjusts skill gain so that skills rack up slower; choose twice as long to skill, five times longer, or twenty-five times longer (currently I am using 5x. So far, so good, but it's pretty simple to alter).
Skill Limiting for Toddlers and/or Children by Ancient Highway (new link courtesy of ZephyrZodiac)
Probably best used in conjunction with a Harder Skills mod if those still prove too fast for you, Skill Limiting mods mean that toddlers can at MOST reach skill level three and children can at most reach skill level five... when using Maxis objects. You'd have to mod custom toys yourself. (Books, not bookshelves, count as Maxis objects, however.)
More Realistic Payment for Maxis Careers by K-C
Cuts Maxis paychecks in half. Useful for not racking up the Simoleons quite so quickly.
Harder Grades by Syberspunk
Available as harder grades, harder grades 2.0, or harder harder grades, makes it not only more difficult but more complicated to get that coveted A+ grade. All updated for Apartment Life, so your kids can walk to school, and your apartment-dwelling neighbors will properly go to school. If you use InTeen, you should refer to this thread for advice on loading order.
Harder Grades for Young Adults by Ancient Highway (New link courtesy of ZephyrZodiac)
Since I didn't mod the Young Adult age, this might not be necessary... unless you find college too easy. Three separate hacks give less credit for attending class and chatting with professors as well as requiring the term paper to get a grade above B+.
Harder Jobs by JM Pescado
According to El Presidente himself, "Makes standard jobs harder: Uni graduates no longer receive automatic L8/L9 start and upper-level jobs have limited numbers of openings. Also includes pay and recognition fixes for TS2OFBp2 'Owned Business' jobs." Because it's not quite right that there can be sixteen mayors in one neighborhood anyway.
No Age Discrimination by JM Pescado
(Download the appropriate version for your latest expansion.)
Elders can be Elders for ages with my mod installed. Get them crappy teen/retiree jobs from the newspaper or normal adult jobs from the computer, and still have a shot at fulfilling a lifetime aspiration before the Reaper comes. There are other versions of this mod, including a flavor pack for InTeen (which I used to use before discarding it in favor of this one), but I like Pescado's because you have the option of Regular or Crapsack jobs for your seniors.
No 20K Handouts by JM Pescado
(Download the appropriate version for your latest expansion.)
A Sim moving away from home or graduating college will take a proportional split of the cash reserves of the current household instead of twenty thousand Simoleons even if he's leaving a dirt-poor hovel.
Bigger Bills by Cyjon
Bills come every day except Sunday, and tend to be quite a bit bigger. Dorm bills come every day including Sunday and are a flat rate of $500 per playable student. See link for more detailed information. Probably not the best mod to combine with reduced salaries or No 20K Handout unless you really like a challenge. (I made myself a version of this one that charges the flat $500 rate for students, but never sends bills otherwise; in my game, there is no electric bill, no water bill, no gas bill, no phone bill, plus everybody will be sending out tithes and taxes to the Church and Crown.)
No, Less, or More Aspiration Decay by Joninmobile
Depending on your playstyle, one or more of these hacks may come in handy for you with an extended Sim lifespan. Less Aspiration Decay will let you leave your Sims in gold and green aspiration longer, although I'm not sure whether More or Less would shorten elder lifespan more reliably.
Increased Challenge Mods, Part One, by SimModder
Business Levels increases how many customer Loyalty Stars you need for the first five levels and nerfs the top cash reward business perk from fifty thousand Simoleons to thirty thousand. Higher Bills, Even Higher Bills, and 10x Higher Bills do exactly what they say on the tin. Higher Bills is not compatible with Apartment Life (and is probably NOT compatible with Mansion and Garden), but was updated by Ancient Highway here. Jobs makes jobs harder-- so they say, even harder than Pescado's Harder Jobs. Jobs requires Seasons but is not compatible with anything higher. Ancient Highway updated it for Apartment Life here. Part Two of SimModder's increased challenge mods only affect dating.
SimModder's Harder Business Even Harder by Ancient Highway
Ancient Highway takes SimModder's Business Levels and makes it even harder by increasing how many stars you need for each level, not just the first five, and lops the cash reward perks down to 10% of what EA intended.
Suggested Companion Mods
These mods won't really slow things down, but they don't make life insanely easier, either, and have the potential to add a lot.
NPC Aging by Ancient Highway (new link courtesy of Rulue on LJ)
"If a nonplayable Sim is on the lot with your active family's sim at 6pm, the Sim will age." Intriguing, provides safeguards for aspirationless teens, and might help to reduce the Townie population. Ostensibly InTeen compatible (although untested with YA families), must load before any age duration mods.
College Scholarships for Talent Badges by Jfade
Scholarships for gold talent badges might take some of the pressure off between Harder Skills, Harder Grades, and Bigger Bills. You know. If you need it.
The Annoying Games Suite by Inge Jones
Multi-package mod preventing your Sims from Doing Stuff they shouldn't be doing unless they have specific objects in their inventory-- for example, you can't play Kicky Bag without a kicky bag in your inventory. You can't write in your diary if you don't own a diary. There are two versions, Strict and Flexible; with the flexible version, your Sims can't muck around autonomously, but you can still direct them to play Kicky Bag for seventeen hours straight (if you need to, for example, get a good picture of your kicky bag default replacement). You can decide piecemeal which nonsense you want to nerf and which behaviors you don't mind being autonomous... for your whole game or on a Sim-by-Sim basis. (This, and not having given my Sims any toys, is what led to one of my couples having three toddlers at once.)
Feed Baby and Feed Baby Plugins by Boiling Oil
(Plugins here.)
An update to Squinge's enabled Feed Baby interaction, BO's version both replaces Squinge's and adds new functionality. The plugins, in particular, allow the player to turn some Sims into wet nurses-- so if Lady Whoever has three toddlers, a baby, and a bun in the oven, she can have some healthy peasant woman move in to nurse the baby. (Also good for men who've been abducted by aliens if you ONLY want to designate your abductee as able to breastfeed (Squinge's version allows for male and female breastfeeding as long as they're a parent), or if they want to hire a wet nurse, or if their wife wants to nurse the baby. Also turns a Servo into an Infant Feeding Unit if you slip a bottle into its inventory.)
Wanna help me feed my cats?
In case you feel like dropping me a buck or two, should you have a buck or two to spare. Donors get two things at the moment: a) a link to the Super Secret Cat Gallery, full of pictures of the cats you'll be feeding, updated sporadically when the cats do something photogenic and I'm fast enough on the trigger to catch it, and b) a link to the list of content I have done-but-not-screencapped, nearly done, partly done, or in the planning stages, and the option to suggest what ought to be in the next batch of things I focus on.
I want my Sims' lives to make sense.
"Don't get me wrong, it's the proportion. I love the breadth, it's the length. Now, she may be the right length, but is she right for me?"
-- Pseudolus, the lyingest, cheatingest, sloppiest slave in all Rome, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Sim lifespans are all funky.
Pregnancy lasts for three days. Infancy for three days. Toddlerhood for four days. Childhood for eight days, the teen years for fifteen days. If you go off to college, that's another twenty-four days, adulthood itself lasts for twenty-nine days whether you go to college or not, and you can be a senior citizen for as little as nine days or as much as thirty.
What the hell is that hot mess? You're a teenager for half the length of your adult years, your university career is only two days shorter than it will take you to reach retirement age, and childhood is over in a relative blink of an eye?
There's no sense of proportion, besides roughly doubling each age when you hit the next-- okay, reasonably, infancy could last as long as pregnancy, but if pregnancy is nine months, Sim kids start school at the age of... twenty-one months? And whose adolescence lasted twice as long as their childhood?
I decided to scrap that and start over.
The popular count says that pregnancy lasts for nine months, each trimester being three months long. Sim pregnancy lines up neatly wth that, lasting for three days with each trimester lasting approximately one Sim day. I don't know how to change it, and it makes enough sense that I didn't want to change it.
So! There's my base proportion-- if three days is nine months, then one day is three months, and one year is four days.
I took that and ran with it. If you decide to use my aging mod, this is how the ages play out:
Sims
Baby: Birth to One Year, 4 days (EAxis, 3 days)
Toddler: Age One to Age Four, 12 days (EAxis, 4 days)
Child: Age Four to Age Twelve, 32 days (Eaxis, 8 days)
Teen: Age Twelve to Age Eighteen, 24 days (EAxis, 15 days)
Young Adult: Unchanged from Maxis, 24 days
Adult: Age Eighteen to Age Forty-Six, 112 days (EAxis, 29 days)
Elder: Age Forty-Six to Death (from 49-100), 12-216 days (EAxis, 9-30 days)
Plantsims
Plantbabies: "Birth" to Age Six, 24 days (EAxis, 3 days)
Plantsims: Age Six to Age Thirty-Four, 112 days (EAxis, 29 days)
Plantsim Elders: Age Thirty-Four to Death (from 35-62), 4-128 days (EAxis, 9-30 days)
Pets
Puppies and Kittens: Birth to One Year, 4 days (EAxis, 5 days)
Large Dogs: Age One to Age Nine, 32 days (EAxis, 21 days)
Elder Large Dogs: Age Nine to Death (11-15), 8-24 days
Small Dogs: Age One to Age Twelve, 44 Days (EAxis, 25)
Elder Small Dog: Age Twelve to Death (14-20), 8-32 days
Cat: Age One to Age Fifteen, 60 days (EAxis, 25)
Elder Cat: Age Fifteen to Death (17-25), 8-40 days
I couldn't find any information on how long EAxis pets stay elders other than 'varies.' I double checked all my notes, which are copious.
(The images for this mod are almost entirely random.)
And a few points of clarification there, yes, kids start school at four years old, which is a mite young-- but not so young that it's implausible. Besides, I just can't look at a Sims 2 toddler as a four year old.
I only gave Plantsim lifespans in years for spawned Plantsims (rather than regular Sims who have been turned into Plantsims); it's simpler that way. Adult Plantsims get the same number of days as adult Sims, again because it's easier and to work with fertility (I'll explain that later). Plantsims have such a short elder lifespan because I really wanted that life state to have a consequence; I like Plantsims way too much to have the only downside be "Well, some people are turned off by them." It seemed fairly reasonable-- if a plant gets too old to bear fruit, it's probably about ready to die.
I really, really wanted to have large dogs stay puppies for more than a year, as in real life (well, they grow, but they're puppies in their brains), but it's the same suspension of disbelief thing that had me sending four-year-olds to kindergarten. Small and large puppies are the same size, so all of a sudden this itty bitty wiggly puppy is this great big galoot of a dog? What?
And then there's the Young Adult thing. There are a couple of reasons I didn't decide to mod the length of University.
One, I like it the length it is. Two, there's already a perfectly functional 48-hour semester mod. So if a six-year University term (that I nevertheless decided to count as four years) bothers you, you can always grab that. Three, well, three has to do with juggling University and InTeen, which allows for Young Adult pregnancy. More on that later.
The benefit to having Sims' lives this long is that you really get to know them; you might not be diving for the Elixir of Life every time you get that "So and So's Birthday is in just two days!" popup to save your favorite Sims from getting old and slumpy. If you're writing a story-driven legacy, you have time to get to know your characters before they grow up, grow old, and die. On top of that, you have time to try things you've never done before-- get a top-level business, hunt down all the vacation mementos, breed pets-- because individual Sims' lives are no longer utterly consumed by grind skills, go to work/school, eat, sleep, breed.
Oh, and your kids? They'll have time to play. That's right. No more only giving them decorative toys or steering the little rugrats away from the dollhouse. Having fun is not a waste of time anymore!
(He's got his father's nose and his mother's ears.)
The trouble, however, is that age duration mods are incompatible with TwoJeffs' Autonomous Casual Romance, one of the single most marvelous mods out there. They don't conflict, as they don't modify any of the same code, but ACR counts a Sim's age in days to calculate their autonomous pregnancy chance. If a Sim is over sixty-five days old, risky woohoo isn't risky and autonomous try-for-baby never happens.
Other than that, ACR works fine, but one of the great things about ACR is that it lets the Sims decide when to breed, instead of leaving it solely in the player's hands. That's one of the things I like most about ACR-- I can leave my Sims unattended and they'll go fool around on their own, because they want to.
I figured my options were an age duration mod or ACR until I happened upon this thread on MATY... and decided to mod ACR. If it could be done once, I figured it could be done again.
ACR version 1.10.10 is supported-- if something screws up, let me know, and I'll try and fix it. the ACR version 2 beta is... semi-supported. I don't have Version 2, because I'm waiting for it to be out of beta, but I have modded the appropriate file for both 2.5b and 2.5c. If something goes wrong, let me know and I'll try and fix it... but you'll have to test it, O brave downloader, because I'm not ready to upgrade yet.
But what the whole ACR thing let me do, practically, was create a fertility arc. See, ACR introduces declining fertility to your Sims; Maxis coding has a Sim five days away from becoming an elder have the same chance of pregnancy that a Sim on her first day as an adult does. ACR starts Sims off with high fertility that continually drops over a Sim's lifetime-- although it only applies to ACR's Risky Woohoo and autonomous try-for-baby interactions, so you can still have your peri-menopausal ladies catch pregnant by deliberately trying the Maxis way.
Which is awesome, but if I'm adding realism (in terms of proportion, anyway), why not add some more? I mean, I already had to mod that bit.
(Dude, I don't think she's going for it.)
ACR is InTeen compatible, which means that autonomous fertility starts at InTeen's 'sweet eighteen,' eight days before the adult transition (if you have vanilla InTeen installed, this is the age where teens can get adult jobs and move out on their own while remaining teenagers). ACR's base chance of pregnancy for a Sim at Sweet Eighteen is 70%, the highest chance they'll ever get. (This chance is modified by a ton of other things that I didn't futz with. You can also increase or decrease the odds manually in game.)
I looked it up. That's not when peak fertility hits human females. On top of that, using my math for this mod, eight days before the adult transition is sixteen, not eighteen. I don't have a problem with the whole young-mother thing, since my game is Medieval and crossbow (too early for shotguns) weddings have a certain appeal, but those odds were a smidge high for my liking.
Using my ages, fertility over time breaks down like this: teen Sims become autonomously fertile (as in, they can decide for themselves when to woohoo and/or try for baby) at age sixteen, with a 51% base chance of pregnancy, if you have InTeen, ACR, and my mod installed. Without InTeen, fertility hits with the adult transition, as usual, at age eighteen with a 63% base chance. Female Sims hit the top of their fertility arc at age twenty-two-- 70%, just like the highest fertility in Original Recipe ACR-- which lasts until twenty-four and a quarter. Things still stay pretty high until age twenty-six, and then starts the downward swing of the arc. By thirty-five, the base chance reaches 23% and begins to drop sharply. By age forty, base odds are at just 5% and have leveled out a little; it isn't until age forty-three and three-quarters that the base odds hit 0% (autonomous pregnancy is still possible at this point! There are plenty of other modifiers built in, these are just the base odds). InTeen's Age 40 is five days before elder transition, which in this case is forty-four and three-quarters-- which means that InTeen users can still get their Sims pregnant if they hurry, but the chances of miscarriage increase (especially for Sims who have had previous miscarriages). Elder transition is at forty-six, which is not the end of the 0% pregnancy odds (as in unmodded ACR, that's six days past Elder transition-- why? I dunno, but it seemed safest to stick with what TwoJeffs did), but the game won't let your Sims get pregnant anymore anyway, so it might as well be.
It all looks needlessly complicated, but human females are less fertile at menarche, become more likely to get pregnant over time as their menstrual cycles even out, and then as they approach menopause, their chance of pregnancy decreases. I wanted that for my Sims, not a straight line from Really Fertile to Not Fertile At All. (I drew a graph for this to help me find the numbers for each day, you guys. For serious. I actually needed something from seventh-grade math class!)
(She got her father's nose and her mother's ears, too. And Mom's skin. Dad's skin is because he's a warlock.)
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 controller. 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 Young Adult 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 non-collegiate.
The trouble with that is... well, scroll on back up there and look at my numbers for the default Maxis ages. If a Sim fools around with her sweetheart on the first day of college and 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. Our co-ed's child will be a teenager before Momma graduates college in what's supposed to be four-to-sixish years. That makes absolutely no sense.
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. (If you have a breeding family in a rental home, I will say that having the full twenty-four days of college makes everything lots easier, because you have enough time to get reasonable grades, teach all those toddler skills, and crank out a few paintings or restaurant guides or novels to keep up with the bills.)
(Does that hourglass exist as clutter? My day would be made.)
Now that I've talked about kids, teenagers, fertility, and Young Adults, it's probably time to talk about elders.
Man, Simmers hate elders. I can kinda get it, suddenly your perky young fit Sims have turned into these slumping hunchbacked shamblers who have to get up in the middle of the night to pee and only have gray hair in their bin by default and can only get stunted jobs.
But, listen, living things age. It happens. It's a scary change, like puberty, but it's totally natural. You don't have to hate it. In fact, after a hundred and twelve days of adulthood, you might actually be ready for it when it happens to your Sims.
But dang, did I have to make the elder stage potentially last so long? Twelve to two-hundred-sixteen days is kind of a wide spread...
Because such wide spreads happen in reality. Sometimes people drop dead at the age of 49-- if it seems too young for Old Age to claim your Sims, tell the story and call it a stroke or a heart attack. Sometimes people live to be a hundred years old. The average lifespan for a healthy human being is somewhere around 72 years, and that's about what it is for Sims under this mod. (So why do they get old and gray at only 46? Because of a limitation in ACR which meant that I couldn't effectively extend fertility past a certain point without figuring out how to work with multipliers in BHAVs, and I was kind of scared to do that. I also really wanted the ACR fertility cutoff point to be after the elder transition, as in the original ACR. Paranoia and knowing my own limitations, I guess.)
With the various bonuses and detriments for aspiration and the random factor involved in Sim elders' remaining years, your Sims could drop dead of old age at literally any time after having been elders for twelve days. They get one significant random factor, plus bonuses based on their aspiration level when they age up. If you want to be sure your Sim will live a long, long time, max out that aspiration meter right before their elder transition. Want to be rid of them quickly? Try and arrange a red meter. In testing in my game, my youngest death comes at age 56, and my oldest at age 96. Most Sims who were green or gold at the time they aged up wound up with an expiration date in their 70s... Which is about average for death by old age. (You can always arrange it so something else kills them first, you know.)
(... I really did not intend for it to look like Lord Lankin and his wolfy buddy should be the something else you arrange to kill your elders.)
Okay, so now we've talked about what the mod does; let's talk about how to get it working correctly, and how to use it.
New age lengths will apply to new Sims fresh out of CAS or Sims born after the aging mod is installed. Existing Sims will either have to wait for their next age transition for the mod to take effect. (You can always use Boolprop cheats to age them up and then down again.) All aging mods work this way; it's not really something I can fix.
If you're installing a tweaked ACR controller, too, you will have to remove and re-give everyone's tokens to trigger the fertility changes. The in-game ACR controller has an option to do this, although it may take a little while if your neighborhood is full of Sims or your computer is slow.
EDIT: In regards to ACR Version 2, there is no way to remove and re-give Sims' tokens after resetting their ages, but to get the same effect in regards to autonomous fertility, you should reset ACR to the default. Other than that, aging them up or down and back again and using SimPE, SimBlender, or drinking Elixir of Life while in red or green aspiration to get your Sims back to the correct point in their lifespan does work!
There are five files in the download; you need no more than three of them. Three shall be the number of the counting and the number shall be three. Count ye to two only under certain circumstances, never unto four, and five is right out.
Sim and Plantsim ages and pet ages are separate files; you can use one, the other, or both. If you don't use ACR, that's all you need. Install them in your downloads folder. Do not use with other age duration mods unless you're downloading a semester-length mod; that mod should probably load after mine. (Shouldn't be hard, my name is Almighty Hat and my file names start with [, so almost anything that doesn't start with ( will come first.)
There are four versions of the ACR main controller: 1.10.10, 2.5b, 2.5c (still available) and v2 Final. "Final" is the final release of ACR 2.0; 1.10.10 is the final release of ACR 1.0. You can only choose ONE of these and it has to correspond exactly to your current version of ACR. Knowing which version of ACR you're using is your responsibility; if you downloaded your version of ACR here, you probably want the 1.10.10 version; if you downloaded your version of ACR here, instead, you need either 2.5c or v2 Final. If you have a lower version of ACR 2.0, I can probably update it if you send me the controller file, but it's probably better for you to update your ACR. Put ONLY the appropriate file in your downloads folder and REMOVE the file called ACR - Controller - Main, just to be on the safe side. (Do not delete it. Just remove it. Put it on your desktop or something.)
Okay, let me outline a few pros and cons to this whole mess and we'll move on to downloads and recommended side mods.
(If a Plantsim is chased by bees, is it sexual harassment?)
You will need some increased-challenge mods, if you don't want all your Sims to be super skilled, super wealthy, permanently platinum demigods by the time they're in junior high.
Seasons (if you have Seasons installed) end up being fifteen months long by default. The only way to make Seasons proportional to an aging mod would be to download something like the Seasonal Aging Mod from MATY I linked to, where one year equals twenty days, or by shortening the seasons so much that weather doesn't really have any time to accumulate.
If you're running the kind of challenge where you have to whip through Sim generations relatively quickly, this mod will be of no use to you.
If you have a Sim selling the Castway Stories Elixir of Life in an OFB shop, it is seriously undervalued by default for how powerful this mod makes it (considering it rockets Sims all the way back to the first day of their current life stage).
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 know how to fix.
Elixir of Life is no longer of inflated value: thirty-two thousand aspiration points buys fifteen days of life. In an unmodded game, that's half the adult lifespan if one Sim drinks all of it. With my mod installed, it's three years and nine months. Likewise, using the Elixir in green or red aspiration only takes a small portion of a Sim's life away.
In an unmodded game, if a Sim gets knocked up their first day of adulthood and successfully Tries For Baby as soon as the grub is born, repeating the process after each birth, a Sim can have eight kids, discounting twins and Elixir of Life; with this mod, if a Sim gets knocked up their first day of adulthood and successfully Tries For Baby as soon as the grub is born, repeating the process after each birth one Sim can have 35 kids, discounting twins. (Frighteningly, this is just shy of physically impossible in humans-- it actually takes closer to ten months to complete a pregnancy, not nine (or rather, nine months and ten days; Sim pregnancies take 75 hours), 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.)
Aging mod plus ACR controller designed to function properly with aging mod plus too many 'no autonomous X' mods tends to equal Sims who, left to their own devices, woohoo kind of a lot. Upside, you no longer have to order them to do it if they like each other enough. Downside, it is easily possible to have houses with three siblings under the age of four.
If you're running or thinking of running a story-driven legacy, you have more time to get to know your characters without having to cheat their ages. (Nothing against cheating ages, but it's easier if it happens automatically, right?)
Family Sims can feasibly have ten children or raise twenty puppies or kittens without extending their lifespans or (if you use a mod that enables teen pregnancy) starting as teenagers. Likewise, Romance Sims can now have fifty first dates and still have a shot at settling down after they finish sowing their wild, wild oats.
Sims have time to try things-- go on more dates, throw parties, take vacations, and basically have lives beyond skill, badge, work, breed. The toddler age, specifically, is long enough that there isn't really any need to grind toddler skills-- they can eat, sleep, have a few baths, and play. It's even possible to get a toddler all their toddler skills and a few regular skill points before they age up to child without use of Smart Milk AND while using a Harder Skills mod.
Well, I'm out of pictures, so it must be time to download. Let me first thank...
TwoJeffs for ACR and all the awesomeness it brings, Tom Dumahel, Abel6669, and Lientebollemeis on MTS for their aging mods, which I took apart to learn how to make my own, Awrevell on MATY for the Seasonal Aging Mod that proved ACR and aging mods can play well together if you cooperate, Quaxi for SimPE, without which nothing much would be possible, to my beta testers Kinsley, Eva, Aquilegia, Lyndira, Cassandra, Meshy, Astral Faery, Sparrow, and I thiiiiiink that's everybody.
And now,
DO NOT DOWNLOAD THE OTHER TWO! They're here for posterity, or maybe if you have a non-final version of ACR to fix yourself. Thanks to a comment by Eisbaer, here, several ten-year-old typos have been revealed to me, which will cut off fertility early. If you downloaded It's The Proportion at any time before January 4, 2022, please redownload (you will have to manually replace your ACR Main package, the updated ones have different file names.)
DOWNLOAD GESTATION-BASED AGING for ACR V2 FINAL FINAL! on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
If you have a non-final version of ACRv2 you want to edit yourself, Eisbaer's invaluable instructions are as follows:
In the BHAV Token-Sub-Calculate Pregnancy Odds, "node 4 needs to contain the largest number you used in the BCON table. Here 190 (but in hex, so BE). Node 5 contains the ID of that last BCON line, here 126 (in hex 7E). In my SimPe is a small crossed-hammer-button on the lower right-hand side that helps to convert decimal to hex numbers when you click on it.
And node 2 and node 6 contain the lowest number of days you set. Here 64. This is important so the correct line in the BCON will be read from. e.g, you are 67 days old, so line 3 contains the fertility for 67 days. 67 days in the token minus node 6 (64) equals 3 (aka BCON line 3). Almighty your file subtracts 63 and would jump to the wrong line in the BCON."
So there you go. Thank you so much, Eisbaer, I would literally never have caught those issues.
There are written instructions in the zip file, remember not to install them (text files slow your loading. I'd've included a picture, but you have to keep your backup ACR - Controller - Main file somewhere, too).
I've also included this list of suggested side mods in the download, but you know what? Let's put them here, too. Because with increased lifespans come some difficulties like... Free Time induced permaplat states happening while Sims are children-- or while plantsims are toddlers.
Optional but Helpful Side Mods
Plantbaby Changes by Cyjon
Plantbabies only get half the skills of the parent Sim, Nature enthusiasm is maxed (with FT), and genetic personality is set correctly. Give those plantsim kids something to really work at!
Slower Lifetime Aspiration Benefits in Free Time by Doc Doofus
Cuts accumulation of Lifetime Aspiration points by one-third, reducing the likelihood of hitting permaplat state somewhere in toddlerhood. Eliminates accumulation of Lifetime Aspiration points in college entirely, because EAxis already had it so low.
Fragile Permaplat by Cyjon
A big enough fear can, in fact, break your Sims' permaplat status, reducing the annoyance of toddlers in permaplat with Free Time.
Realistic Ages: Harder Skill Learning by Lientebollemeis (Removed from MTS by Lientebollemeis, who has moved to TSR (though these mods are free there) and opened a blog, but you can grab the skill-building mods here, at Lientebollemeis's request. If the link doesn't work for you, try back in a few hours or with another browser.
Adjusts skill gain so that skills rack up slower; choose twice as long to skill, five times longer, or twenty-five times longer (currently I am using 5x. So far, so good, but it's pretty simple to alter).
Skill Limiting for Toddlers and/or Children by Ancient Highway (new link courtesy of ZephyrZodiac)
Probably best used in conjunction with a Harder Skills mod if those still prove too fast for you, Skill Limiting mods mean that toddlers can at MOST reach skill level three and children can at most reach skill level five... when using Maxis objects. You'd have to mod custom toys yourself. (Books, not bookshelves, count as Maxis objects, however.)
More Realistic Payment for Maxis Careers by K-C
Cuts Maxis paychecks in half. Useful for not racking up the Simoleons quite so quickly.
Harder Grades by Syberspunk
Available as harder grades, harder grades 2.0, or harder harder grades, makes it not only more difficult but more complicated to get that coveted A+ grade. All updated for Apartment Life, so your kids can walk to school, and your apartment-dwelling neighbors will properly go to school. If you use InTeen, you should refer to this thread for advice on loading order.
Harder Grades for Young Adults by Ancient Highway (New link courtesy of ZephyrZodiac)
Since I didn't mod the Young Adult age, this might not be necessary... unless you find college too easy. Three separate hacks give less credit for attending class and chatting with professors as well as requiring the term paper to get a grade above B+.
Harder Jobs by JM Pescado
According to El Presidente himself, "Makes standard jobs harder: Uni graduates no longer receive automatic L8/L9 start and upper-level jobs have limited numbers of openings. Also includes pay and recognition fixes for TS2OFBp2 'Owned Business' jobs." Because it's not quite right that there can be sixteen mayors in one neighborhood anyway.
No Age Discrimination by JM Pescado
(Download the appropriate version for your latest expansion.)
Elders can be Elders for ages with my mod installed. Get them crappy teen/retiree jobs from the newspaper or normal adult jobs from the computer, and still have a shot at fulfilling a lifetime aspiration before the Reaper comes. There are other versions of this mod, including a flavor pack for InTeen (which I used to use before discarding it in favor of this one), but I like Pescado's because you have the option of Regular or Crapsack jobs for your seniors.
No 20K Handouts by JM Pescado
(Download the appropriate version for your latest expansion.)
A Sim moving away from home or graduating college will take a proportional split of the cash reserves of the current household instead of twenty thousand Simoleons even if he's leaving a dirt-poor hovel.
Bigger Bills by Cyjon
Bills come every day except Sunday, and tend to be quite a bit bigger. Dorm bills come every day including Sunday and are a flat rate of $500 per playable student. See link for more detailed information. Probably not the best mod to combine with reduced salaries or No 20K Handout unless you really like a challenge. (I made myself a version of this one that charges the flat $500 rate for students, but never sends bills otherwise; in my game, there is no electric bill, no water bill, no gas bill, no phone bill, plus everybody will be sending out tithes and taxes to the Church and Crown.)
No, Less, or More Aspiration Decay by Joninmobile
Depending on your playstyle, one or more of these hacks may come in handy for you with an extended Sim lifespan. Less Aspiration Decay will let you leave your Sims in gold and green aspiration longer, although I'm not sure whether More or Less would shorten elder lifespan more reliably.
Increased Challenge Mods, Part One, by SimModder
Business Levels increases how many customer Loyalty Stars you need for the first five levels and nerfs the top cash reward business perk from fifty thousand Simoleons to thirty thousand. Higher Bills, Even Higher Bills, and 10x Higher Bills do exactly what they say on the tin. Higher Bills is not compatible with Apartment Life (and is probably NOT compatible with Mansion and Garden), but was updated by Ancient Highway here. Jobs makes jobs harder-- so they say, even harder than Pescado's Harder Jobs. Jobs requires Seasons but is not compatible with anything higher. Ancient Highway updated it for Apartment Life here. Part Two of SimModder's increased challenge mods only affect dating.
SimModder's Harder Business Even Harder by Ancient Highway
Ancient Highway takes SimModder's Business Levels and makes it even harder by increasing how many stars you need for each level, not just the first five, and lops the cash reward perks down to 10% of what EA intended.
Suggested Companion Mods
These mods won't really slow things down, but they don't make life insanely easier, either, and have the potential to add a lot.
NPC Aging by Ancient Highway (new link courtesy of Rulue on LJ)
"If a nonplayable Sim is on the lot with your active family's sim at 6pm, the Sim will age." Intriguing, provides safeguards for aspirationless teens, and might help to reduce the Townie population. Ostensibly InTeen compatible (although untested with YA families), must load before any age duration mods.
College Scholarships for Talent Badges by Jfade
Scholarships for gold talent badges might take some of the pressure off between Harder Skills, Harder Grades, and Bigger Bills. You know. If you need it.
The Annoying Games Suite by Inge Jones
Multi-package mod preventing your Sims from Doing Stuff they shouldn't be doing unless they have specific objects in their inventory-- for example, you can't play Kicky Bag without a kicky bag in your inventory. You can't write in your diary if you don't own a diary. There are two versions, Strict and Flexible; with the flexible version, your Sims can't muck around autonomously, but you can still direct them to play Kicky Bag for seventeen hours straight (if you need to, for example, get a good picture of your kicky bag default replacement). You can decide piecemeal which nonsense you want to nerf and which behaviors you don't mind being autonomous... for your whole game or on a Sim-by-Sim basis. (This, and not having given my Sims any toys, is what led to one of my couples having three toddlers at once.)
Feed Baby and Feed Baby Plugins by Boiling Oil
(Plugins here.)
An update to Squinge's enabled Feed Baby interaction, BO's version both replaces Squinge's and adds new functionality. The plugins, in particular, allow the player to turn some Sims into wet nurses-- so if Lady Whoever has three toddlers, a baby, and a bun in the oven, she can have some healthy peasant woman move in to nurse the baby. (Also good for men who've been abducted by aliens if you ONLY want to designate your abductee as able to breastfeed (Squinge's version allows for male and female breastfeeding as long as they're a parent), or if they want to hire a wet nurse, or if their wife wants to nurse the baby. Also turns a Servo into an Infant Feeding Unit if you slip a bottle into its inventory.)
Wanna help me feed my cats?
In case you feel like dropping me a buck or two, should you have a buck or two to spare. Donors get two things at the moment: a) a link to the Super Secret Cat Gallery, full of pictures of the cats you'll be feeding, updated sporadically when the cats do something photogenic and I'm fast enough on the trigger to catch it, and b) a link to the list of content I have done-but-not-screencapped, nearly done, partly done, or in the planning stages, and the option to suggest what ought to be in the next batch of things I focus on.
