Do you use any mods for custom lifespans? Which ones would you recommend?

I want my game to feel less rushes, so I was considering getting one, but I'm pretty worried about the Elder stage feeling far too long that way. I'm generally curious about what people prefer and pros/cons.

I created my own Age Duration hack. It's fairly easy to do so you could make one that sets each age duration to exactly what you want.

In my game, I use the following.
Baby is 3
Toddler is 4
Child is 8
Teen is 15
Adult is random 29-39 + aspiration bonus
Elder is random 11-21
Aspiration bonus/penalty ranges from -2 to +14

This means my theoretical longest Sim life would be 104
30 (pre-adult) + 39 (adult max) + 14 (aspiration max) + 21 (elder max) = 104.

I set childhood to 14 days (cause kids should be kids as long as they can and it might be my favorite stage) and teenhood to I believe 8-10? (I find it a bit boring). I lengthened adulthood by a couple days and the rest I left alone. I do age sims up as soon as I get the "one day left" notification so everything's shortened by one day in practice.

I give them the elixir of life when I feel they have earned it. I consider that is not able to help an elder, so they don't get it. The writing's on the wall, and the clock is ticking for them. Teens need to be careful and take no more than a couple glasses.

My life span is 1 day = 6 months.
Infants - 2 (1 year)
Toddler -8 (4 years)
Children - 14 (7 years)
Teens - 10 (5 years)
YA - 10 (5 years)
Adult - 74 (37 years)
Elder - ? Random. Turns elder on turning 60 if you add up the years.

The best life span is the one you tweak yourself.

I use Inge's age hack "Age Group Tweak"-

https://simlogical.com/sl/Sims2Pages/Sims2_Aging.htm

and I changed the ages as:

Baby: 2 days (0 to 2 years)
Toddler: 3 days (2 to 5 years)
Children: 6 days (6 years to 12)
Teens: 6 days (13 to 18 years)
Adults: variable, up to 80 days
Elders: unchanged

Yes, I did fudge a little around the baby and toddler ages, but that's a sometimes a difficult age to define anyway.

It depends on the hood for me. I have different lifespans in different saves because of the gameplay style.

In my custom hood that I've played for almost 4 years, I started with normal maxis, but I quickly felt like the adult stage was way too short, so I changed that one only. At first, I changed it to 45 days, and then I changed it again to 55. However, now that my hood is grown so much and I have a long list of households to get through in 1 round, I decided to shorten their lifespan to make them live way shorter lives. I am technically playing them for less time, but I still see my sims in their neighbors' houses and out in the town, so it doesn't feel so bad. Besides, from one round to the other, it feels like those sims have "lived" even if you haven't played them.

So right now my lifespan looks like this:

Baby: 2 days
Toddler: 3 days
Children: 6 days
Teens: 10 days
Young Adult (College): 12 days (Up until recently I used to play the 24 days)
Adult: 40 days
Elder: 9-31 days (The Maxis one)

So my sims have gone from living 118-139 to 82-103 days.

The only thing I changed is halfing the teenage days to 7 instead of 14 because it was just way too long for me to enjoy.

Thank you for all the input!



Thank you for the tip! Do you know if there's a maximum age that needs to be tweaked like the description suggests (to keep teens from dying of old age, for example)? And do you know if this might conflict with hacks that change the lifespan of supernaturals?

I have no idea at all about any of your questions, to be honest. I just used a normal human lifespan (North American) for the guidelines. I've seen age mods that can extend the spans to infinity (as well as the game "aging off") so I couldn't tell you.

I will tell you one thing though-that there is a vampire aging hack that if you use it in your game (to make vampires age like humans) that the pets will never age. That one I learned from another thread a long time ago.

If you do have hacks for supernaturals that change their lifespan, that might interfere with any aging mod-that's a given. "Only one at a time" is the motto.

Right at the very beginning, in November 2012, before I even made Andrew, I played the tutorial. I looked at Tutorial Joe. His panel said he would he would become an Elder in 28 days. "That's only a month," I said to myself. "But he looks so young!" I decided there and then to play with "Aging off". I've stuck with that ever since, and have never regretted that decision. (I had read about the Aging cheat in the little manual that cane with the game.) I occasionally turn Aging on again to allow a Sim to age up (for example from Baby to Toddler). If there was an Elder living in the same house, I might use the Sim Manipulator to give them extra days so they don't die on me. I might also use it to stop an older Sim on the lot aging up at the same time as the baby.

In Sims terms, since I'm an Elder myself, almost all of my Sims are younger than me. As I enjoy playing teens, most of them are much younger than me. I really don't want any of them to predecease me. Since I'm the oldest, I should be the first to go. True, there are a few Elder Sims who might be older than me (I certainly believe I look younger than Consort or Patrizio!) and at one time I even considered turning Aging on to let Consort die for story purposes. But after so long playing with Aging off, I would feel I was murdering him -- I just can't do it. And maybe over the years the old man has grown on me a bit. I think he really has mellowed a little too.

I still haven't seen a Sim die in my game in the entire eleven plus years I've been playing. I haven't really modded out death, but I have modded out some of the main causes, and "Aging off" effectively mods out death by old age. For the rest, I have developed a slow and protective playstyle that has kept them all safe thus far. Long may it continue! Long live my Sims!

Thank you. The description on the page suggests it might be necessary to change something else if you go past the default lifespan but I guess not if you haven't encountered any issues like that.

I don't make my vampires age but thank you for the tip! I do disable individual pets aging sometimes because I feel bad when they die

Yeah, the conflict makes sense. The one you linked has fields for PlantSim ages. I don't think I have any mods that change those lifestages for them so I've just set them to match regular Sims', hopefully nothing will implode on me.



I can't even begin to imagine making my Sims pretty much immortal... I feel like I'd have a hard time keeping up with all the households. Then again, I assume babies born in your game end up staying toddlers or kids and don't become adults with their own households? That might make it less overwhelming.

Then again, I can't imagine playing a lot of teenagers. I don't hate them as much as some people do and I've added mods like a playable school that make them more fun, but they feel so limited compared to adults. Even simulating a teenager running away by moving out on their own isn't possible by default, that annoys me beyond belief!

I've never used a lifespan mod. If I need them to have a few days extra, I just give them some with a mod. I've played with aging off sometimes, but most of the time I keep forgetting (I'll fix their days left, though). Most of my sims never get to be elders (if I age them up, they're mostly left as perma-adults )

I keep forgetting to turn aging off for my story sims - but most of the time I tend to save in the morning and do whatever I need, then quit without saving, so they reset back to their original age anyway.

Nah, I leave it as it is. Might've turned off aging a time or two but that was probabl when I first started messing with dodgy cc and the tombstone of LD when I was like 12
I think the life span they have is fine, at least for the way I play (casually abandoning the family after 1 or 2 game sessions).

I don't really see my Sims as immortal. I see them as as mortal as I am, but since most of them are much younger than me, I think in the proper order of things, the Grim Reaper should really take me before he takes them. Also, as I grow older, I am well aware that I cannot save those I love in Real Life from death; I lost my mother in 2022, and I was almost as close to her as Andrew is to Gloria! That probably makes my Sims even more important to me. I empathise easily with my Sims; I think I see them them as fellow travellers on the Great Journey of Life. I reckon I'll always do my best to look after my Sims because I care about them -- love them even. But of course there are no guarantees in life -- either theirs or mine. But I think I can guarantee that, if any of them do die before me, they won't die unmourned.

If I live another fifteen or twenty years, and am still able to play The Sims 2, then it's possible that some of my toddler and child Sims might reach early adulthood, but I think it more likely that most will still be children or (at best) teens, when I pass. Like children I meet in Real Life, it's unrealistic to expect to live to see them all grow up.

Yes I do play with a disproportionate number of teens. I think I find them, for the most part unencumbered by adult responsibilities, more fun to play than adults. Myself I was a teen in the 1960s, which in many respects was really the Decade of the Teenager. Sometimes I feel that in the years since teens have been infantilized by being treated more and more like children. In the sixties, where I live most people left school and started work at fifteen. Sixteen was the age for getting married, for seeing X certificate (adult) films, and for buying cigarettes. It wasn't unusual to be taking on adult responsibilities in your teens. In my game I find my teens the equal of adults in most respects. Is there anybody better at bringing up a family on a pittance of a wage than the Newsons? Myself though I stayed on at school till I was nearly eighteen, and I reckon my teenage life was ruined by too much homework, and also, if I'm honest, by my own shyness. Was all the homework worth it? I'm honestly not convinced that it was. Going to an all-boys school, I found it hard to talk to girls, and at that time I never even considered a relationship with another boy. It would have been illegal if I had. (One thing that has improved a bit!) So I try to make sure that my teen Sims enjoy their youth more than I did. And, if they're gay, they're not ashamed to show it.

Or maybe I'm just immature! I've never been in a proper romantic relationship, and I've certainly never had children. So in some ways, in my head, maybe I've never moved on past the teenage stage. Since my mother died, and she's not there to tell me to go to bed, I often find myself playing a certain computer game well into the small hours of the morning. Of course I never played computer games as a teenager: if you wanted to play on a computer when I was a teen, you really had to have a parent working at Bell Labs!

I have Move In All and Move Out Teens mods by Pinhead, which do allow my Sims to move out of one household and into another. Unfortunately these mods were never (AFAIK) updated for the later EPs. They really are essential to my playstyle -- that's why I don't have any EPs beyond OFB. Recently, using the Move In All mod, desperately shy CAS-created teen Roger Jeffreys moved out of his downtown family home in Greaves Avenue, and in with the Tinkers in Bluewater, at the invitation of his girlfriend Melody Tinker. They make an odd couple because Melody is so much more sophisticated than Roger, but they seem to really love each other!