the circle of life: birth, health, and death in my game

I thought I’d pop out a quickie gameplay post that I’ve been meaning to talk about. Population, aging, births, and death!

As it stands, my TS4 game has nearly 350 “playable” sims, meaning sims that are living in houses, tracked in my databases, and played occasionally in the rotation. You wouldn’t know most of these sims. Many of them haven’t worked their way into my story yet even as background fodder, but I’ve made them myself and would welcome them to date my sims someday if they want. Any other townies in the townie bin I couldn’t care less about. They are marked as unplayed and the game can cull them if it wants to.

Thank you to the For Rent pack for giving me places to put all these sims!

So here comes the math: to keep about 350 sims at an average life span of about 75 years, I need to add about 2 sims per aging year in the town. How it actually works out is that there are fewer older sims than younger ones, as sims start to die off in their 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. So what I aim for then is 3-4 sims born into every aging year.

This health and birth system was something I came up with while playing with my Freeplay sims, for the short run I had with that game. In Sims Freeplay (SFP from here), last I played it anyway, there was a population cap of about 34 sims. And yes, that is a tiny little town! There was a need for very strict population control, which meant that for new babies to be born, someone had to die. But it was an interesting play style to take note of, because it’s what I did with my TS2 sims for a really long time, and it’s what enabled that neighborhood to progress for nearly 100 sim-years in time. It’s a rule that I’d like to carry over into my TS4 play, that there should be no new sims added except those birthed to my existing sims. From there, careers will be full of workers and young people will have plenty of sims to date and marry.

The whole time I was playing TS3, I didn’t see a single sim die! I also didn’t progress my neighborhood more than about 9 months in Sim-time, and I think there may be a correlation there. Before I paused the timeline for Drown, I had gotten through about 10 months of story time in TS4 in just 6 real-life months! In TS3 (and even TS2, in the latter portions of my playing) I got into the bad habit of making new young adult sims instead of just playing forward in time so my children could grow up INTO new young adult sims. I somehow got that right while I was playing TS2 in the early years, and then forgot it all. New sims are the death of neighborhood progression. And so it took playing SFP to remind me of what to do and not do to make sure that my neighborhood actually progresses this time!

What else not to do, like pause the timeline completely to tell a 30-chapter flashback story, lol! But I’m only doing that once, so I hope the timeline will pick up its nice speed again when I’m done.



pregnancy:

So my goal is 2-4 new births for every year of gameplay. Any time there is a gap in any life stage, I know it will be a pain for me when those few sims reach young adulthood. They’ll have fewer people to date and make friends with, their careers will be less full, and the stories will be a lot less fun to play. For a thriving town, I need a steady flow of baby sims being born, so that they’ll grow into children and eventually become the adults that will carry on the next generations. It also keeps a steady flow of children to fill my school classes with same-aged classmates, and a wide selection of teens for my teen sims to date. When they become adults, there will be a steady flow of educated sims to fill my careers. Bringing in townies is always a pain because they don’t have the 20 years of raising that born-in-game sims have—no skills, no relationships, no family, no history—and I would always rather not use them.

In normal times, 2-4 baby sims per year is not hard to do, but the problem comes with times (like now, actually) when none of my sims really want to have a baby. Besides Lucy, lol! But Lucy can’t have ALL of the babies, even though she would probably like to. Those who are in the family-building time of their lives are already pregnant or have just given birth. But I NEED BABIES, lol! The balance of my neighborhoods requires new sims to be born, so whether they like it or not, if somebody doesn’t give soon, I’ll have to slightly up the risky rates until someone gives me pixel spawn.

That sounds terrible, doesn’t it? lol! But I am a needy sim god and they will give me what I want. 😂

In this case, I also allow for a wishy-washy “wouldn’t be the end of the world if she got pregnant” risky rate for some of these sims. These are couples who were maybe going to start trying soon, or maybe wanted another but weren’t sure. It’s better to have them have another baby than to force an “unwanted” on another poor couple when it would be really inconvenient for them. (I had way too much of that in my TS2 game, and the stories were way too sad!) Though of course, that chance is always there for anyone who is having sex. As is biology.

Pregnancy, either by desire or by accident, is taken care of by Wicked Whims (18+) AND Relationship & Pregnancy Overhaul.

Fertility rates look like the following under normal conditions. All female sims between the age of 12 and 45 who are having opposite-sex relations will have their fertility rates adjusted to these numbers. 

x = no chance, not sexually active with a man, is already pregnant, or is less than 3 months postpartum 

2% = average birth control 

2%, minus 1% for each additional careful birth control trait: neat, genius, snob, perfectionist, ambitious, workaholic, self-assured, squeamish, hates children, good manners, responsible, emotional control 

2%, plus 1% for each additional sloppy trait = clumsy, lazy, slob, insane, family-oriented, glutton, absent-minded, bad manners, irresponsible, uncontrolled emotions 

— Sims with both sloppy and careful traits would take a sum of all of their traits. Maya for example, is genius, slob, and family-oriented. So 2 + 1 + 1 - 1 = 3 

5-10% = age 18-35 who are less than 1 month coming off birth control, or thinking about trying but unsure  

35% = trying for baby age 18-24
30% = trying for baby age 25-28
25% = trying for baby age 29-32
20% = trying for baby age 33-35
15% = trying for baby age 36-37
10% = trying for baby age 38-39
5% = trying for baby age 40-44
1% = trying for baby age 45-49 

— fertility treatment + 15%

Okay, now this is going to get even dorkier, lol!

Each woman’s fertility when she’s trying to have a baby is also modified by two other factors.

First, at age 12, each woman rolls a fertility modifier. For most, it will be “normal for her age,” but for some it could be -2%, -5%, -10%, -20%, or even -50% (making them effectively infertile).

So for example, a 29 year-old woman who rolled a -5% fertility rate, when she wanted to have a baby she would use 20% (25-5). At this rate, it will probably take her a few months to succeed, but eventually, it is likely to happen.

Second, each woman’s fertility rate is also slightly modified by the age of her male partner.

male:
age 12-29, normal
age 30-39, -2%
age 40-49, -5%
age 50-59, -12%
age 60-69, -20%

So that same 29 year-old woman who is married to a 29 year-old man, her fertility would be the same 20%. If she were married to a much older 52 year-old man, she would have to use 8% when trying to have a baby.

All of this probably makes it sound like I want LESS babies in my towns, but what it does is actually space out the “wanted” babies so that I have less need to force “unwanted” babies on sims who don’t want them if the world is having a dry spell.

(I have much debated with myself about why all of the baby burden is only placed on my female sims and not the males, when you know it takes two to tango! How unfeminist of me! So I’ve also made a rule that my male sims are NOT allowed to mess around with any townie females, and thus, it covers everyone. If one of my male sims ever did start pining for a townie and wanted to get her into bed, she would have to become playable and be entered into the fertility system.)

Sims can buy fertility treatment in game for $3000 per cycle (plus applicable aspiration points).

This sounds all complicated, probably, but it’s really not. Each woman has a pregnancy rate based on how much birth control she is or isn’t using and her fertility rate. Those rates are entered into the mods I use, but I also write them down in my notes and/or their profiles, because mods lose your settings sometimes. I have a handy chart in my own personal notes to keep track of what everyone’s rates are, along with some other family planning notes to remember. A sampling here:

Inara [2] — wants to start a family soon, needs a partner
Jessica [0] — wants to start a family soon, needs a partner
Cora [1] — thinking about it
Keri [0]
Maya [2]
Lisa [5] — plans to start trying for 2nd in summer 2088
Elise [2]
April -2% [2]
Raquel [x] — wants a family, waiting for Sarah to get on board
Summer -10% [0]
Maria [1]

health and death:

So there you have the birth of new life, and next comes death.

In a perfect world, each sim would live a full 75-80 years, and then die in turn, oldest first, when all of their life goals have been accomplished. But that’s also not very interesting from a storytelling or gameplay angle.

This is another system I developed for SFP, when deaths were absolutely necessary to get a new baby sim. In TS4, new babies can be had whenever you want them, but for sanity, it’s still a good idea to make sure that the towns aren’t too full.

So here is a system of “health strikes” which are rolled each month. This is another way a sim might die, in addition to in-game accidents. Because of the way TS4 handles unplayed old age deaths and how they don’t leave gravestones, none of my sims will die randomly that way. I have set my aging mod to give each of my sims a minimum of 85 years in game, and that number will be modified by a system of health strikes and benefits.

It looks like this:

*         a minor health complication, likely unknown
**       a minor health complication, known
***     a serious health complication, not necessarily life-threatening
****   a serious health complication, life-threatening
***** death

Five strikes and you’re out.

The sims in my world are ordered by age, from oldest to youngest, on my resident page. A secret: you can actually see my sims’ health strikes in white stars if you highlight the whole text of the residents page. I need to keep the record of how many strikes each has, and this was the easiest way I could find. It’s not really a spoiler, exactly, because a sim could have one or two strikes and still live a very long time. By the time a sim has 3-4 strikes, it would have probably already been disclosed in the stories that they were sick.

The oldest sim will always have the greatest chance of bad health, and the chances decrease down the line gradually. It looks kind of like this in the ROS file:

*health strikes:
nobody [250]
sim 1 [30]
sim 2 [29]
sim 3 [28]
sim 4 [27]
sim 5 [26]
sim 6 [25]
sim 7 [24]
sim 8 [23]
sim 9 [22]
sim 10 [21]
sim 11 [20]
sim 12 [19]
sim 13 [18]
sim 14 [17]
sim 15 [16]

And so on...

But there is also a lot of pure chance involved here. Not only because who is “sim 1” would change from time to time as new sims are added or pass away, but just the random luck of the draw. I have had sims near the top of the list live to be very old and in perfect health still for a very long time. I have had other younger sims draw health strikes several times in a row and end up dying in their adulthood. For example, Marc Hall (Erin’s partner/Kayla’s dad/Pamela’s affair) was a victim of this at age 42.

I love that it gives death some order and sense of impending eventuality, all while still keeping me guessing about when it will actually happen.

I run my health strike chances from elder through about teen, with the oldest 30 sims having a higher chance of failing health. Because I have no desire to write any stories about sick children in my simming projects, even though it happens sometimes in real life. I’m just not gonna go there because I don’t want to.

Of course, sims are also eligible for immediate deaths by the game’s various kinds of random accidental death (electrocution, rage, drowning...).

Sims are allowed to plead to the reaper for the life of a loved one, but sims brought back from death will gain one health strike.

The monthly random draw won’t be the only way to accumulate health strikes. I liked Maisie’s post about giving benefits and penalties to sims based on their lifestyle, so I wanted to incorporate something like that, too.


Lifetime mental health penalties: 

At age 65, on their elder birthday, a sim’s lifetime mental health will be taken into account. TS4 keeps track of certain stats for our sims, and emotional changes are one of those stats. Most sims are happy more often than not. Realistically, some emotions could take a toll on your health. This would be more than just going through a rough patch for a couple of months, or even a year. A sim wouldn’t accumulate numbers like these unless they had an ongoing struggle for most of their life—anger issues, depression, being stuck in a poor relationship situation, financial woes, terrible living conditions for an extended period of time.

# of times sad > 300 = 1* penalty
# of times tense > 400 = 1* penalty
# of times angry > 500 = 1* penalty
# of misfortunes > 20 = 1* penalty

I have chosen not to penalize sims for “uncomfortable” because that emotion happens pretty often for inconsequential reasons like needing to pee, lol!

Misfortunes are counted as: bladder failure, singed by fire, passed out, fires witnessed, deaths witnessed. I would like to add to that some things that aren’t tracked, but which I consider pretty unfortunate: being fired, being cheated on by a partner, divorce, hospitalization, lawsuit or imprisonment, being the victim of a crime. These things I will need to keep track of myself in the stories or sim profiles.

Benefits: 

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Sims can accumulate bonuses as well to combat the health strikes. You can think of them as health points, or extra lives in a video game (remember 1-ups in Mario?).

good habits bonus: At age 18, on their young adult birthday, sims will have a +1 bonus for each of the following traits they have. Examples: active, high metabolism, green thumb, cheerful, good, neat, perfectionist, outgoing, family-oriented, loves outdoors, gym rat, carefree, vegetarian 

circle of friends bonus: At age 40, sims will get a +1 bonus for having more than 10 good friends, including family members. 

life partner bonus: At age 40, sims will get a +1 bonus for being in a > 90/90 committed relationship that has spanned 8 years or more. 

achievement bonus: At age 65, on their elder birthday, sims will get a +1 bonus for each completed aspiration. Completing an athletic aspiration and receiving the “long lived” trait will count for a +2 bonus.

wellness bonus: Also at age 65, sims will get a +1 bonus for having 5 or more skill points in fitness, gardening, herbalism, or wellness.

whims bonus: At age 65, sims will get a +1 bonus for having completed 1500 or more whims.

So healthier sims can also achieve a buffer of points to use against any health strikes they might roll, and this will extend the possibility of a longer life.

***

And that concludes my very elaborate and dorky determining of life and death in my TS4 game.

Thank you for reading!