Revision as of 00:45, 28 November 2009

Aging

In TS3, you have the ability to control your sims' aging - or, more specifically, to set the length of their life to either Short, Medium, Normal, Long, or Epic. You can change this setting at any point, and it will take immediate effect. There is also an in-game "No aging" setting - these are found in Options -> Game Options. Depending on traits, sims can live longer than the average life span (i.e. vegetarian sims).

Age Duration

The age durations for each setting:

Note that these are not -exact- lifespans - sims don't automatically keel over and die when they reach 180 days on Epic lifespans. There's some variance, so sims can live a significant amount longer (and possibly shorter) than the numbers above.

Birthdays

There are three ways to have a birthday:

Cake!

If you buy a birthday cake from Buy -> By Function -> Entertainment -> Parties, then any sim can blow out the candles at any time - it doesn't have to be their birthday! If you choose to have a sim blow out the candles, then they will skip the rest of their current age, and move on to the next one instantly.

Birthdays

If you wait for a sim to reach their natural birthday, they will age up automatically.

Cheat

If you want to age up your sim immediately, but don't want to use a cake, you can do this:

• Hit Ctrl-Shift-C (or Ctrl-Windows key-Shift-C in Vista) to bring up the cheat box
• Type in testingcheatsenabled true
• Hold down shift and click the sim you want to age up, then click "Trigger Age Transition". Be warned, that once you've pressed the button you can't cancel the transition, and you can only age sims up - not back down again!

De-Aging

Aging up is one thing - aging down or preventing aging is quite another.

Unfortunately, TS3 includes no "setage" cheat like TS2 did, so de-aging a sim from one age group to another is not really doable. JM Pescado's Awesomemod does allow you to take sims back to Create a Sim and technically you can change their age there, but it is not recommended or supported.

Within a particular age stage, you can use Life Fruit or Ambrosia to increase the number of days until your sim ages to the next age stage, de-aging a sim but keeping them in the same age stage.

• Exploit/Trick: Life Fruit normally gives back one day of youth, and Ambrosia usually gives back two weeks. However, if you change the sim's lifespan in the game options, they'll still have the same percentage of time to the next age transition. You can get more time out of your Lifefruit and Ambrosia by changing the lifespan slider in the options to Short before consuming Life Fruit/Ambrosia, and then change it back to how you had it before. Obviously, this won't work if you're already playing with Short lifespans.