This is probably technically a stupid question that should go in the FAQ, but questions tend to get drowned there and I could use your help on this.

Does anyone know what Maxis defines as one month in Sim time? So not your personal decision, but the actual game mechanism. I'm working on a mini-mod to adapt the game to my slower time period, and it uses month as variable. I don't know what that means in terms of game-days, never seen it before. The code in question is the code that ages the teddy bear, which takes 1 game month in default coding. So if someone knows more or less how long it takes before teddys get worn that would also answer my question.

Also, how neat is it that the game actually has months hidden in there? I had no idea.

As for months in the code I have no idea on that.

Now with seasons and having 4 slots for them you can set it where each seasons have 3 months and work from there.

Maybe Chris Hatch would know about that.

I know that we can set up months in our own rules, but I need to know what the game considers a month to be. If no one knows I guess I'll just have to place a teddy and watch it on speed 3 for ages, but it'd be nice to skip that step.

This is interesting to me about the teddy bear having a 1month age on it, and it is intresting that you are using that to adapt your time. I have thought about aging and time and calendars for a long time and can never come to anything I can make sense of in my mind. I would be interested in hearing more on how this turns out, and this may even be a more stupid question how do you know when the teddy is worn out ? I have not seen it.

I decided to just suck it up and try it, and the teddy turned into it's worn state at approximately 10 days and 2 hours, so I guess 10ish days is one month by game standard (at least by teddy month standard).

@ Coffeen: I may have been unclear I am not adapting my time frame to the teddy, I'm adapting the teddy to my time frame. My age spans are set to 8 days as baby and 15 as toddler, which means a teddy started looking ancient early on in toddler-hood, if given early. I decided to see if I could fix it, and found that the game measures it by month, hence asking here to see if anyone knew what that mean, so I would know what to change it to in my game

You know the teddy is worn, because it looks like this


It's a great touch, I'm very fond of it. But to me, that's how a teddy should look when passed down to the next generation once or twice, and with frequent use. Sitting in a corner for 10 days is not realistic :P

That makes total sense and I would never have thought about teddy aging old early on if you had not mentioned that cause it totally makes sense. Sorry a little off topic, but if you do not mind would you mind sharing the rest of your aging specs and season length ? Althought I am not sure I could deal with the 8 days for baby.. , but I am trying to find something that makes me content with something that feels a little realistic.

Sure A year in my game is 24 days. It starts with 5 days of spring, then 6 days of summer, followed by 6 days of autumn and ends with 7 days of winter. Winter is a little longer for two reasons, one being that I live in Sweden and that's normal to me, the other being that I love having Sim kids play in the snow as well as celebrating christmas and new year. The extra day gives more time for all that, and makes it more likely that the weather spawns a nice thick layer of snow.

My age spans are
Baby 8
Toddler 15
Child 26
Teen 35
Adult 140
Elder 70
Pregnancy 18 days

I want children to have a chance of playing in the snow, so I set that as my base line. All kids must be kids during one winter, which means they have to be children for at least one year. I gave them 2 days extra so there is some wiggle-room. I then figured baby+toddler (I consider toddler to be age 2-5 in our world) should be more or less equivalent to childhood stage, but minus a few days since they are a lot of work. A Sim should be teen longer than child, and I wanted time for making friends, learning skills and dating. Then I simply added those ages + college span (not modified), which is 104. I don't want my Sims to have to make babies on their first day of adult in order to not be old by the time they graduate, so I added the duration of the teen stage to give some room to get settled. I interpret the maxis elder stage as being upper 60, so to me it's reasonable to still be adult when your kids graduate. The elder span I simply halved the adult stage, because say adult from 25 to 65, plus half is 85 on average which seemed pretty realistic to me.

That's how I set up my system. It's the result of lots of pondering and making small modifications (and I'm sure there are more to come). If you are finding it hard to decide, figure out what is important to you. Eg I want kids to have a chance to play in the snow, baby+toddler more or less equals childhood, and adults should still be adults when kids graduate. Once you find one digit, the rest will sort of follow. I chose to set up my seasons first and adjusts ages to that, but that's because I really enjoy seasons (both Sims and real life). To you, it may make more sense to start from ages. You say 8 days as baby is a lot for you, so you know you want less than that. What would feel like a natural duration for you?

EDIT: Realized I forgot to list pregnancy-reasoning. The ages have a somewhat coherence with aging in our world, which makes the pregnancy duration very un-world-realistic. I like pregnant Sims, the second trimester belly is really pretty in my opinion. I wanted more time to enjoy that. The reason it's 18 specifically is because of stuff related to my hood rebuild and how the story went in my original hood. I'm probably going to shorten it soon, because it makes having babies in college very unlikely.

I like your age span, @gummilutt! When I play TS2 I view 4 days = 1 year. Same for TS3 and my age spans I set for that.

@PlatinumPlumbbob So your sims take half a week to brush their teeth if 4 sim minutes = 1 day? And my mom thinks I'm slow in the bathroom! Lol

This sounds like you worked this out well. I think what I get hung up on is the whole acr working with the ages changes. I was thinking of doing 6 days seasons all around making it 24 days in a year, my mindset was 2 days for each month of the year calendar wise, but then using 24 as a multiplier is too much, and I had not thought of it the way you have done yours, not baseing it all on the 24 day calendar
Like you, I want my kids and teens to have time to make friends and have play time in the different seasons , and not feel rushed with having kids, but I always struggle with how old are they in real life years ? for storytelling purposes. Your system sounds great all around, do you use Acr ? If so did you mod it ? Is there a pregnancy mod for 18 days ?

I'm afraid I don't use ACR, so I can't help you there. Not too familiar with it's exact runnings either, other than "allows Sims to do romantic stuff on their own to a higher extent, and lets you set stuff". But if you like my way of thinking, you could try to describe what the ACR-issues are and see if we can't incorporate them some way. I've been meaning to look into at least trying ACR, so it may be a good place to start for me too.

With my system I figured that trying to replicate our years and seasons doesn't work. It'd take too long. So I went with keeping the proportions of ages correct, but dropping the years old-thing completely, and then simply going by how many seasons I want them to live through. In my mind though, baby stage is our 1-2 years. Toddler is 2-5. Child is 5-11. Teen is 12-20. YA is 20-25. Adult is 25-65. And elder is just 65+. It works for me, but if one starts to look closely into the whole days-vs our year ration it's not even through the Sims life-time. I just aimed to fill the criteria for me to have fun

I don't know of an existing uploaded 18 day pregnancy mod, but lientebollemeis has an extended version in her realistic ages 1 day-upload (it's like 200+ days though). But pregnancy duration is one of those things that is really easy to do yourself. Same with age spans and season spans. You're welcome to PM me if you'd like me to guide you through doing it yourself. Or I can send you mine, it's up to you

Wait the teddy bear has a worn state?

MIND BLOWN

Never knew that. Jeez I learn something new everytime I come on MTS. I really do.

Pm full

Could one clue about the length of a month be the time between the beginning of winter and a Sim's want to give a gift? In my game, that want invariably pops up around the second day of winter. Even though the game does not have an official Christmas, I associate the gift-giving want with that holiday.

Sorry about that, cleared up some space

tancred, I tested it in game and the month it uses with teddy's is apparently 10 days. No idea if it's used elsewhere though.

Ohhh, that's right, there is a Santa appearance. I just don't have the expansion packs to get him! (I know, I know, I need to get the UC.)

Coffeen, google Hat's Gestational Aging and read it (it's long) and then scroll through the comments for instructions on how to mod ACR for longer age spans. Or that sounds long enough that you could probably use her modded ACR controller and it would work adequately, though you might not get a drop off in fertility.

How utterly weird that they would code in a "month". I'd always felt that Sim-time isn't quite the same as Earth-time, anyway, what with pregnancy lasting three days and the age spans being so bizarre, and then when they added seasons...

But yes the worn teddy is interesting. In base game, indeed, you could manually change the colour. If you left it, it would still age though. In my nostalgia (AGS adding one EP a generation) challenge it seemed to take longer than ten days.

I have read through both of these threads and I am still stumped I am just not getting it .. Math is not my strong suit. I can find my way around SimPE to change the aging, but I am cluesless as to how they came up with the numbers for the modifying Acr, I could edit thiers to my lucky but thier adult is 112 and this one would need to be 140 and I am not clear on how to add those numbers. I am going to continue to try and fiddle, but the whole thing the way it is explained in those two posts is very overwhelming for me to understand. No matter how many times I think I am starting to understand some of it I get lost again.It may make me sound like an idiot but I have no clue how they derived the number 190 to even start with.


http://hat-plays-sims.dreamwidth.org/23906.html
http://www.simbology.com/smf/index.php?topic=7314.0

Ah okay. It is tricky. I think with those numbers, try plopping her ACR controller into a test hood and manually ageing your test sim to different ages (using SimPE or the blender) and see what percentages you get for Try for Baby (which is the basic fertility rate). If it works, then great. If it's still not quite right then perhaps somebody will help you with it.

I tried this and not sure if I did something wrong, but I put her age mod and her acr and used simblender to age up 3 months at a time and at the beginning age of 112 days left the percent was 62% and I age all the way down to 82 days remaining and the percent was still 62%. I also tried deleting the acr each time before checking the states no changes. The acr stat screen had an age of 68 when the sim had 112 days left as well. .. So so far I have not seen the percent change at all .