Adjustable Age categories and Seasons duration

[SpokenSoftly]

I personally prefer Epic age rate for my playthroughs, but with the younger ages adjusted so that they're only young long enough to get things set up well for college. The Dream Launcher allows me to set stuff up to Epic, but it resets all the ages to the default Epic whenever I load into the save. Could the launcher be adjusted so that individual age categories can have custom ranges? If it's already an option, please how do I get to it?

[marcos4503]

Hi! Unfortunately, it is not currently possible to change the life span of Sims, individually by age, in the Launcher. Only using the Short, Medium, Normal, Long and Epic Presets.

I intend to add this function in the future, or at least Presets with different age combinations. This option was not added right from the beginning due to some reasons of integrity and consistency of the options, in addition to the priority of other things in the development of the Launcher.

The alternative to get around this, at least for now, is to edit the "options.ini" file, located in "C:\Users<user>\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3", changing the value of the variables "agingstagelengthbaby", "agingstagelengthtoddler", "agingstagelengthchild", "agingstagelengthteen", "agingstagelengthyoungadult", "agingstagelengthadult" and "agingstagelengthelder". In any of these variables, simply enter the number of days you want (in an integer). Unfortunately, this edit will need to be made every time the Launcher finishes initializing, when the message "Ready to play!" appears in the Launcher footer.

This need to edit the file every time the Launcher finishes initializing occurs because the Launcher has a mechanism for maintaining the integrity of various game files. This is why the Launcher always synchronizes the options configured in it with the "options.ini" file during its initialization.

Just to give me an idea, how do you usually set your Sims lifespans? (in days for each age)

[SpokenSoftly]

Most of my playthroughs I set my sims to the default Epic lengths, then reduce Baby, Child, Toddler and Teen to somewhere between 7 and 10 days to give a good buffer for learning skills and going to school. I've also done one or two not-quite-immortal playthroughs in the past where I'd just jack up everything as high as it could possibly go.

Changing the options inside the save itself each time I start up is easier on my workflow than going into the ini file, but I'll look forward to when the function is added to the launcher itself.

On a related note, would it be possible to have season duration sliders instead of a dropdown option? I like having 28-day summers when I'm in the Isla Paradiso map but the launcher only lets you set 7 or 14 days.

[marcos4503]

Got it!

I preferred to keep predefined options for some time, age, and other settings, to avoid inconsistencies or lack of coherence in these important settings, which generates much lower error rates when combining these settings. Depending on the setting that is not well combined with another, it can even generate errors in some mods, among other things.

But I'll see what I can do! I'll try to add more options to the Presets, to allow for greater variation in settings. Do you have more favorite presets for ages and season lengths?

[SpokenSoftly]

My two most common presets for age are:
Baby minimum
Toddler 7 days (more than enough time to learn relevant shit)
Child/Teen 14 days (more than enough time to get grades up even with inconvenient birthing times)
YA minimum (don't really get much out of this one normally)
Adult maximum
Elder default

And the same again but with YA and Elder at maximum for just ludicrously long games.

Season lengths I pretty much stick to multiples of seven, tho occasionally I'll put Winter down to the minimum length (3 I think?) when I wanna go ham on gardening for a while. I just found it a little odd that the launcher only goes up to 14, even though in-game you can go up to 28

[marcos4503]

Got it. I'll bring these changes to the Launcher as soon as I can. Thanks for your feedback!