So... my computer exploded. Yes, literally exploded. Don't ask how, I'd like to know that myself. Unfortunately this means that I've lost my entire game so I'm essentially (literally?) starting over from scratch. Typically I'm a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants player: I play whatever family I want for as long as I want and don't worry about the rest of the neighbourhood. The major down side to this is that I end up with lots of families where the kids are older than their parents and the "plans" I make for my sims goes out the window because I've royally screwed everything up timeline-wise. This, as you can imagine, is highly irritating and something I'd like to avoid in the future.

And so I ask you, fellow players, for your expertise on these key questions:

1) While I've never played a neighbourhood rotation myself, it sounds like something that might be useful to combat my scattered playstyle. What amount of time do you give each family before moving on to the next? How/why did you decide how much time to use?

2) How many days do you allow for each life stage? I'm currently (or was) playing with the custom lifespan below, but I have no idea how I came up with those timeframes. I find I get bored playing with adults for ever and ever, but even then I still run out of time for things I want them to achieve and end up using the potion of life anyway. This also means that if I want my families to have 2-3 kids they have to start trying right away instead of leveling up in their career tracks or starting businesses. (I always use silent pregnancy so there's no "try for baby" option in my game. My sims like the surprise.)


If you have any other suggestions about how to better manage the timeline in my neighbourhood please let me know. If I can't get my own life organized, I might as well do it for my sims!

I tend to play by season and right now I'm updating Exhaustion Valley to be on the same timeline as my favorite family from it, which has been... A Challenge because the Tilments had four teens off to college when the rest of the hood was babies, toddlers, and a couple kids. Now I have to age everyone up, add at least one more child, and quickly determine what kind of story for the individual family I was going for four years ago lmao. My point is, it's not impossible to convert your hood to rotation, but it's a lot of work and you have to decide what family will 'lead' timeline wise.

Anyway, I go for one season no matter how many days they have left and save at 4am on the first day of the season. Over in Gallatin, this is working quite well with every house on the second summer. Another suggestion is to keep track of main events in each household just so that you can plan your story with their timeline in mind, and if you're away from the game for a long time, your plans at the time would be right there.

Well, I, too, am a "fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants player: I play whatever family I want for as long as I want and don't worry about the rest of the neighbourhood" and it is perfectly fine because I just turn aging off and only age sims when I feel like it for my story. No need to keep track of anything. I also like surprises with quiet pregnancy and even go further than that to make surprise baby daddies. https://youtu.be/3_EB_xOwEcY?t=338 I say the only problem is that you haven't gone far enough. Embrace the chaos!

What amount of time do you give each family before moving on to the next? How/why did you decide how much time to use?

I allow myself to move within the rotation.
To explain what that means: A full rotation at a house is a full season (5 days) The rotation is finished once the season changes and I can see that by putting my mouse over the house. If it's Spring rotation I know not to play any house showing summer because they are finished, but the ones still showing spring I need to load up and play. But I don't play there for the full season in one go, I hop around. So I normally play for 1-2 days before hopping over to another Spring house. families where the kids are older, nobody is ageing or sick I will keep playing unless I am bored.

I do this for a few reasons.
I need to make sure that any babies/toddlers/kids are ageing in reasonable sync.
If they age to child and are going to my playable school the school needs some free days for them to actually attend.
Same with playgroup/nursery
If a sim gets sick I might send them to the hospital and the hospital will need days in the rotation free so I can play them there and so I can play the family without the family member.
same also goes for prison.

I do not want a toddler ageing to child and going off on the bus to my playable school when in reality they are not enrolled and have not been played there and another not aged at all and missing school all week. Same way I don't want a sick sim spreading the flu around town when in reality they would have gone to hospital days before.

How many days do you allow for each life stage?
I have a fairly strict ageing system based on 1 day = 6 months.

pregnancy 2 days (or one year long)
Baby 2 days (up to the first birthday)
Toddler 8 days (1-4 years)
Child 14 days (5-11 years)
Teen 10 days (12-17 years)
Y Adult 10 days (18-23 years)
Adult 74 days (23-59 years
Elder 60+ and I have no idea since my hood is 3 years old and I have yet to have an elder die. I play very slowly.
Elder 10-30 days

As for being a rotational player, I regard myself as a very relaxed one. I don't use aging off. I don't care if A is older than B, at some point I will play B until he catches up with A. (If I want to ).

While I do get to all the families, there is no rule about the time I will spend with them. I am not going to leave at 6am if a baby is born, a kid is going to grow up, a golden wedding anniversary is going to happen, or - most important - if I am having a lot of fun

Spring comes earlier at some family residences and winter later at others I will not let having to keep things in sync dampen my enjoyment of the game (it is a game, after all, not a work, or an assignment, or a project for a snotty boss). I don't want to be bound by rules about whom I have to play.

Since I like to fill dorms with my own sims, I do make sure that there are always at least 6 teens ready to go to Uni. So if one teen is ready to go (and had some fun during the teen years, of course), that family will not be played until there are at least 5 other teens ready to fill the quota at Uni (my dorms have 6 rooms). This is perhaps the one are where I am strict - no teens are just sent to Uni the moment they turn into a teen, they have to have a teen life first (play in a band, join a hiking/fishing club, have some garage parties, go jogging with their sporty friends).

I play all the houses in a neighborhood for 1 day each-I've extended that to Uni, manually pushing the lot sync timer to the same day within that time, so every house has the same time period. However, in Uni, I stop just before any of the houses has a final exam scheduled, because that is also dependent on another mod (24 hour per semester) to run with.
I've tried to break out of this pattern at times, but it throws my inner control freak off badly. To keep track of special events I always mark the sync timer with the "special" day to keep the rotation in line. Pretty useful.
The age spans I use:
Pregnancy: 18 hours. It keeps the whole scenario neat-and I always play a house with a baby expected until the baby is born.If the baby is due in the next day, I'll delay it until the proper time comes.
Babies: 2 days
toddlers: 2 days
Children: 6 days
Teens: 6 days
YA: As long as they're in college-usually 4 days (sometimes it feels endless because they often have to repeat a semester..)
Adults-any amount of time because I use Inge's age controller, but usually 30-40 years.
Elders-I have no idea usually because of the variation in life spans, but I'd guess about 20 days.

Because I also have Chris Hatch's 'half-speed' mod, days can take a bit to get through which is why I do only 1 day rotations, but it feels more realistic.

This has always been an interesting topic for me, and I have never really settled on one way. My dilemma is I get bored quick with everything. I have always found it frustrating for say a baby to not be a baby for all 4 seasons, just using that as an example because at the moment I do not the default ages. I get bored playing every family for the same 4 seasons til they are all synced, and it just feels weird to me. When I first started playing I felt I had to rush adult hood to have kids so the parents were not elders. Then I saw the aging system Laura at Lakeside Heights was using and that seemed like it might work for me, but I have not tried it yet. Then for me the other dilemma was Acr and using custom ages doesn't always work out well, and then l toyed with learning how to mod that, and got frustrated so I put my game down for a bit, and recently came back to set up a new nh, with a smaller downloads folder and try to simplify things and try this time to let go of perfection, but real life has been busy so the Seasons thing, the lifespan thing is still a thing for me. Aging off is a thought, but remembering to age, and depending on how many sims in the nh it is very daunting for me to think of that idea. I have been trying to write notes to help me figure out what I want an need, such as how much time do I think I need to accomplish what I want with teens, and go from there, the tough part for me is going to get adults and Acr on the same page.

I play my hood in a seasonal rotation with each season being 5 days. Why? It just seemed like a natural time to switch and was one less thing to keep up with. And if you keep all the families in the same season, then as Jo said, you can easily see which families still need to be played to complete the rotation. I use season and day of week controllers to set new families to the correct day and season so they match the existing rotation when they buy their first house. New houses are bought and Sims moved to them between rotations.

I also happen to keep a spreadsheet of the hood which I keep updated with the family members and their ages. I use the spreadsheet to help determine the order I play the families as I don't play the families in the same order every rotation. I play families with babies first, then families with toddlers, then children, then teens, then childless adults, then elders. Obviously there will be some overlap as families may have multiple different aged offspring but I tend to play those with the youngest children first. This way they may meet other family's children who are currently their age but will age up later during that rotation. It's one way how I try to make it easier for my Sims to meet as many other Sims close to their same age as I can.

My Sims' life stage lengths are:
Baby 2
Toddler 3
Child 7
Teen 14
Adult 28-33
Elder 10-25
This generally pertains to about 1 Sim day = 1 year. I give the teen's extra days since I don't play the YA stage.

I actually find that I get bored with my elders, especially if they are the only ones left in the house or those still there are in school or at work. Chris Hatch's Senior Centre mod helps combat this somewhat if they no longer have jobs themselves by giving them a rabbit-hole place to go. I tend to keep them working as long as possible so that their days go by faster. I also tend to play the elders at a higher speed simply because they don't have as much to do at that age.

My hood is currently on its 91-95 day rotation with 47 families and the first Gen 4 Sims becoming adults. No Gen 5's on the way yet (that I know of - yes, I too love the silent pregnancy as well as the Trips and Quads mod for those BIG surprises).

When I play one of my "Beginning Hoods" I play 1 day each family to get them set up the way I want them then play each family till the babies grow up to child.
(Then I play each family 1 week at a time with the first week is what is left over from the first day, normally this is 6 days.)

Monday set up the family.
Tuesday - Sunday first week.
Monday - Sunday there after.
I have a loose rotation in that I do not go in order but I will always play each family this way for each rotation.

1) While I've never played a neighbourhood rotation myself, it sounds like something that might be useful to combat my scattered playstyle. What amount of time do you give each family before moving on to the next? How/why did you decide how much time to use?
I play every household for 1 sim day, in the same specific order. It's the easiest way for me to keep aging and memories consistant. I use to play for 5 days (or however long a season is) with a different hood, but it really annoyed me that in house 1, if a baby is born on the last day of the season; it will be younger than the baby in house 2, who is born on the first day of the season - even though it was born first. Plus I couldn't get my head around how to work out university and consistant aging. Currently, my sims either become independent teens, or go off to university when they're 6/5 (6 before 6pm, 5 after 6pm) days from becoming adults, and I play a "year" (2 semesters) per rotation, that way when the sims in the main hood become adults, they graduate and become adults too. Keeps everything consistant

Only problem is, my megahood is somewhat out of control by this point - my sims age very slowly because it takes so long to play each household. I've timed it and in the past 9 months, my sims have aged 3 days. Sims that were born in 2014 are only just now adults. It gives me enough time to get to know each and every one of my sims very well, but at the same time my sims are more at risk of getting married and having children at younger ages (somewhere between independent teen and in their first week of adulthood) because I just want them to hurry up and move on with their lives

2) How many days do you allow for each life stage?
I play with the default age ranges. Though I shorten my semesters in university using a modded object. Usually they last for 12-24 hours (meaning I do sometimes play those sims for 2 days, but seeing as uni students don't age, it doesn't matter) depending on whether I can be bothered to play them much. I have trouble doing the same thing time and time again, it's one of the reasons I like my 1 day rotations - because first I'm playing a small family with 2 kids, then an elderly couple, then a family of 20, then a zombie and her adopted daughter, etc. In university it feels too much the same, especially after I play the greek houses, but atleast with such short semesters, I'm off trying to skill build and maintain relationships and keep up needs all at once.

I tie my rotations to the seasons. Let's say all the families are at the start of Spring, I'll just go and play them in whatever order I want, and can even hop between families whenever I want/need to. Just by the end of the rotation everybody should be on the first day of Summer.

I left most of the Life Stages unchanged. The only ones I did change were Teen (cut down to 13 days from 15) Adult (added 10 days to make it 39) and Elder (removed 10 days from the maximum possible length that life stage can have)

While I'm more strict in a BACC/integrated type of hood, I'm usually a "fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants player" too, so I can relate. I do use rotations, but I don't always stick to them. I play weekly rotations and have modded seasons so that they are 7 days. That way rotations and seasons are in sync. I try to get out of each house by 6 am Monday the latest.

If I get engrossed in my sims' stories so much that ages aren't in sync, I have to say I don't get too bothered. I just play the sims until ages are back in sync or I use cheats to age them up. A bit more proactively, though, if I see that I'm taking more time with a sim, I try to turn aging off. Like for example, if my sim is dating around and hasn't settled down and told me what they want to do, or if I decide I want him or her to have an involved side plot before marriage & babies come in the picture, etc., then I turn aging off either for the entire household or with BO's Individual Aging. Most of the time though, I'm not too specific about ages--as long as parents are older than their children and older siblings are somewhat older than their younger siblings, I don't care about exact days. Like if sim A is exactly 10 days older than sim B--I never notice stuff like that. Maybe it's because I play with premades and feel that their ages in relation to their skills and life experience doesn't make sense anyway? Idk.

Anyway I use a week with each household cuz I find it's a good chunk of time to play--I can get a couple of play sessions if I don't want to, or can't, sit down and play it all at once. And if a sim has a job, I'll get to play their off days, no matter what day of the week they are, and that's important because sometimes in busier households, my sims' off days are the only time to advance their personal stories. And then for kids, I get to play them on weekends when they aren't in school and then I can focus on them if I want. Also, because I play Monday to Sunday, it's less likely that I'll forget about bills or that I'll spend all the household's money on something right before a bill is due. Other than that, it just feels weird to leave my sims mid week; it's like I'm stopping in the middle of a random section of book, instead of at the end of a chapter, if that makes sense. On the other hand, if I'm not interested in a household and am finding it boring to play, a week is an eternity and I usually have to break up that household's time into smaller sessions.

OP's age range is similar to mine right now--I don't remember exactly how long I extended adults but mine is: Pregnancy & babies is 3 days each--because any longer than that and I get annoyed. I start to feel like some sims are always pregnant, not to mention it's harder to make sure they stay in a good mood. I play with inTeen and miscarriages, and since sims can feel the affects of pregnancy right away, some sims can have a rough time if the pregnancy stage is longer--though that might be a good challenge in other hoods. Toddlers is 6 days, children is 10, and teens are their default 15. These are all pretty much sweet spots for me. I like the default age length for teens--it gives them plenty of time to grow up, have relationships, goof off, and then get ready for college. If they are in a poorer family where money is tight, then can get a job or help out around the house and I'll still have time for them to go on a few outings, or find a significant other, and get grades in shape for college, if they're going. If in a richer household, they have plenty of time to skill up for scholarships and goof off. And if I'm really, truly tired of seeing them as a teen, they can go to uni early. Similarly toddlers are just the right amount of time for me at 6 days--there's time to learn all the toddler skills without smart milk and then socialize a bit with the family. While sometimes I might feel like I want an extra day or two, any longer than that and in households with lots of kids, it starts to feel like the toddlers are taking over the house. Then me and my sims are whining about needs and environment. Finally kids is nice at 10 days cuz then they aren't too much older or younger than any siblings. YAs are the default 72 hour semesters, which again allows me to focus on their grades but still find time to socialize and focus on other things. I also play with harder uni mods, so sometimes it can be quite a challenge to get my sims to roll the appropriate wants to do well in school. Popularity, family, and pleasure sims can be particularly trying on my patience, waiting all semester, with mere hours before a final, before going 'oh, yeah, I do want to pass this class!' Adults are about 40 days or so while elders are shorter than the default, about 9-15 days. Again I don't remember exactly how many each is. But elders are shorter because I gave all the other ages more time, so by the time a sim becomes an elder, they should have checked off all the things I wanted for them. Also, it's my least favorite stage to play.

The adult age length can be tricky, though. Sometimes I do feel like my sims need more time, especially if I don't have any plans for them and want to explore with them a bit, have them try new things, etc. So I think I might extend that another 7-14 days.

As for tips to keep on track, I do recommend the lot sync timer cuz with that you can at least keep track of how many days ahead or behind some households are.

First things first, sorry about your computer! Hopefully you can play again soon. Now on to the topic, I used to play a little like you, except I didn't quite get the kids older than the parents problem. The aging was waaay off though! Elders somehow being immortal, kids aging in the wrong order etc. The way I play now, I switch households on the beginning of a Season which in my game lasts 7 days. I don't bother with University as I can't fit it into my rotational play where it won't confuse me to smithereens, regardless how much I love the University premade Sims. I truly wish I could just go back to my old style of play, less stressful and more fun. Unfortunately, I can't seem to go back. I try, but I instantly start autonomously setting everyone up in sync!! I literally gave myself a headache trying to figure out how to sync University with my mainhood a few nights ago, for crying out loud. I haven't played properly for 2 months because of it. Hopefully I didn't put you off trying out rotational play.. I thought I'd be brutally honest of my experience.

Anyway, I still haven't settled on the age lengths so this is a "rough draft" which I think I need to change again at some point:

Baby - 3 Days
Toddlers - 5 Days
Children - 8 Days
Teens - 12 Days
Adults - 31 Days
Elders - Varied

I remember a long, long time ago having a neighborhood totally off because I had moved out some Sims that quite frankly I never wanted to play again. That right there is a big part of my problem--I like focusing on one or two families, just doing what I want as my whims strike (after all, what is the point of playing an open-ended game if you can't make up your own rules?). When I did play equally rotationally it was before Seasons but it was close to the length of a season so I think that's just about perfect, or split a week into two play sessions, like Monday through Thursday, then Friday through Sunday (because it's easier to play through a whole weekend than to try to switch back midstream). At the same time if I had families with several offspring aging up I might end up switching just to play long enough to get aged up so they would all be in school together.

The one single thing I do have set in stone from back in the day is to always end the play in a household at the time of the morning when they would wake up because otherwise they'd often end up with needs being reset from installing an expansion pack or something, and it's a pain in the rear when that happens at midnight if they're needing to get up at six to get ready for work.

Oh, P.S. because I forgot to say: if you don't get to start your Sims' life the way you want because of pregnancies and what-not, I'd definitely try either extending their lives or using TwoJeff's mod that allows for multiple births. I decided to use that on one Sim family a long time ago. It was part of a challenge, really, and I've since had to purge my game of that neighborhood because back then I didn't know what I did caused corruption, but I'll start that kind of thing over again one of these times, and what I did was decided that they would get one shot at pregnancy, a random number of babies, and that would be their whole family. As it happened they ended up with triplets. While they were infants they took care of them and ran their home business, then once they were toddlers they closed the home business until they got them all skilled up and before long got them raised into children and once their time was their own again they opened back up their home business. They had plenty of time for the children after school, and once the children became teenagers they worked in their family's business, just like teens in real life generally do when their folks own a business.

I use the lotsynctimer by Pescado.

So if someone moves out in the middle of a rotation, it's easy to keep track of which house needs more play time and come back to them later to keep everyone at the proper ages in relationship to each other. Say the daughter's getting married on Wednesday, and moving into her new husband's apartment with him. Play her family until Wednesday, save and play him, marriage on Wednesday, finish the new couple's rotation, then go back and play her family from Wednesday to the weekend.

This also enables me to do things like shared custody between parents. I just wish it tracked days at college.

Thank you all for the great advice! I really like the idea of rotating all the families so they're in the same season, but still like the freedom of playing each family as long as I want so long as they end up in the same place as everyone else.

Steffyn - Deciding what family will "lead" the timeline is an interesting idea. Thinking of my past neighbourhoods I realize that I've done that without even knowing it!
Sunrader - I'd never heard of making surprise baby daddies! That sounds like a wonderfully creative way to complicate the neighbourhood family trees.
joandsarah77 - That sounds like you have a massive hood! I like the idea of 1 day = 6 months. I'd like to implement something like that in my hood. Do you use any variance for the adult age or is it strictly 74 days?
Justpetro - I always have problems with my coordinating my sims going off to Uni. I tend to send off one at a time but I'd like to try your idea of sending off teens in larger groups.
FranH - I've never used the lot sync timer. Does that throw off the ability for your uni sims to build up their grades?
CoffeenSimming - I really want to put ACR in my game (I've never used it before) but was worried about how it would affect the adult life state since I prefer to use custom aging.
HobbesED - I do like the spreadsheet idea. I found one made by Bulbizarre hidden deep in the forums and think it would be a good place to start. I also hate playing with elders. I've never heard of the Senior Centre mod. What does it do? If it keeps the elders busy and helps speed up their play time it would definitely be something I'd be interested in.
marka93 - I use the first day as a "planning" day too. Playing each family for a week seems like a good length of time, plus it would keep every family on the same rotation.
Bigsimsfan12 - I also shorten my university semesters, I find that 72 hours per semester is way too long and I get sick of playing with that household until the next semester rolls around.
Orphalesion - I agree that the teen life stage is too long. I like giving my teens time to "goof off" once they're done with school and usually send them off to uni within one day of aging to adulthood, but don't think they need to take forever to do it!
Phantomknight - I like the idea of changing the seasons to 7 days so they match up with one sim week. I actually never heard of the lot sync timer before. Does that come with the game or is it a mod?
Fyren5 - Thanks for sharing your experience with rotational play. I'm worried about where the YA sims would be when they age back into the neighbourhood as well and agree that it would be difficult trying to fit them in with the rest of the rotation.
Misty_2004 - Giving them one shot at pregnancy is a really interesting idea. That definitely would make for a challenge if they end up with triplets or quads!

This definitely gives me a lot of ideas that I'd never considered before. Who knew playing with fake virtual families could be so complicated?

Sunbee - I'd never considered shared custody before. How are you able to share them between households? I know teens can move in, but what about children and toddlers?

One thing I'm also curious about is how to handle families when they move to a different house. Does that throw off the seasonal rotation? I've never really paid attention to that before. Since I use no20khandouts my sims essentially come out of uni or move out with no cash of their own and I tend to move everyone into low budget apartment buildings until they build up their money and can buy houses.

This is how I deal with it personally: I just move Sims out on a Monday either at the beginning or end of a rotation, it's so much easier and less complicated for me that way. I use the Season Controller by SimWardrobe to manipulate the Season to be the correct one, example: Sim moves out on first day of Winter. Moves into the new home, which appears to be first day of Summer. I use the Season Controller to manipulate the Season to be first day of Winter instead of Summer. If the day is not set to a Monday, I will use the Day Setter by Neder, here on MTS to set it to the Monday. I also change the time using Sim Manipulator, so if the Sim moved out at 6AM, I'll change the time on the new lot to 6AM. :D

Yikes! Having had a power supply go out with a pop, I can understand how unreal it can be to have a computer make noises it really ought not to. Hope the new computer lasts a good long time!

My game is modded in a few ways to fit the management style I've settled into. Seasons are seven days long and begin on Monday, with each rotation lasting a week (Monday morning to Monday morning). I've tried shorter rotations matching season length, but it never felt like enough time and I hated leaving off on random days. I could never remember if this rotation households had stopped on Tuesday or Thursday or what. I try to stick to a certain pattern of playing households because when I get more than a few families I can easily forget who I have played and not played. This is also why I've changed my seasons to be the same length as a week. It makes it easier to check at a glance if I've played a household, since the information popup shows the season but not the day the family was left on. Occasionally, my game decides it's not going to update the season until 8am or later, but that's fixable. The exception to my rotations is if I have sims who have moved out (usually college students but sometimes regular sims), I might go ahead and play a day to get them moved in and settled.

As for ages, my sims live a long time Default aging left me feeling rushed, like I always had to be pushing for skilling and kids and promotions. I like to take things a little more slowly, give both my sims and myself time to experience things. I don't, however, do aging off because I do like to see my sims grow and go through their lives. And I can't be trusted not to fubar their respective ages if it was left up to me to age them manually. I use a modified version of Almighty Hat's Proportional Aging, in which one day equals three months. It's based off the pregnancy length, so:

Pregnancy - 3 days (9 months)
Baby - 4 days (0-1 years old)
Toddler - 12 days (1-4 years old)
Child - 32 days (4-12)
Teen - 24 days (12-18)
Young Adult - Default length college
Adult - 168 days* (18-60)
Elder - Varies, 4-180 days* (60-105)

I didn't like my sims going all gray and elder at the equivalent of age 45, so I shaved some days off the Elder stage and added them on to the Adult stage. Since I use ACR, I used Hat's accompanying modified ACR fertility, though I tweaked that as well to give the (admittedly low) chance for surprise late stage babies. Since it takes such a long time for my born in game sims to reach Elderhood, I haven't gotten a good chance to see if I need to tweak fertility further.

Edit: As far as families or sims moving, if they're moving to a new (empty) house or apartment then they move out on Sunday night. When they move in, I check to make sure they are on Monday morning and change the season to the correct one. I use the same mods as Fyren5 to make those changes. If the sim is changing household, such as a marriage, then I might do something similar to Sunbee and split the rotation on the two lots until it's done.

Chris' Senior Centre mod can be found HERE. In the instructions it says "This is a phone call found under the Transport Phone Calls to send your retired or unemployed elders out of the house for a while." There are different available times the elders can return (in case they need to be home before youngsters return from school) or to prepare the evening meal. You can download the instructions file and open it with either Word or Wordpad to see more of the mod's description.

I use one-day rotations because I'm always impatient to get to the next family - even though I love this family and was impatient to get here, too! I don't worry about syncing the season or the day of the week, possibly because my rotations are too short for it to really matter. At university, I treat one semester as a day.

I use the standard Maxis aging system, except that I have InTeen, so teens are kicked out of school with seven days to go and can then either go to university or get a head start on working. I use the Job Stopinator to limit how far up the career ladder a Sim can go, based on their academic achievements (except for Athletics, Music and Slacker, where academic performance doesn't seem relevant - this is why I don't use EducayshunIzGud, because it affects all careers).

In other hoods, I've sometimes used InTeen's "independent teen" stage for national service, with the teens living in a barracks and having either a military job or, if it's their LTW, a job in medicine. The downside of this is that those who don't go to university get out of sync age-wise with those who do, but I don't worry too much unless it affects a couple who are going to marry.

I've also sometimes used the Elixir of Life to adjust the adult lifespan. With fixed rules about when the Sim has to take it, regardless of mood, they might live up to 15 days longer than the Maxis default, if they have a happy life, and up to 15 days less if they are unhappy. The full Maxis + 15 days seems more realistic compared to the other life spans; a shortened life span makes some allowance for what in RL would be sickness or disability. Maxis + 15 can feel very long, though.

And if you have two Sims to take care of them it really isn't all that hard either. Then if you throw in a couple of mods (toddlers can sleep all night and get out of their cribs by themselves, which they should be able to do anyway, I sure as heck did) it isn't difficult. Then if your Sim happens to have some snapdragon bouquets it's downright easy. Even so my Sims are pretty good about following my orders to take care of their babies. Shoot, I started out a new Poverty Challenge Sim the other day and he never even did suffer from any kind of motive deprivation, which was a little lackluster. No aspiration rewards are allowed, and of course the snapdragon bouquets are off limits but he and his wife are on their third baby and everyone's as happy as can be, despite being poor as church mice and living in a horrible underground house that's so small they can barely turn around.

I'm a bit like Sunrader: I play with aging off, and only occasionally turn it on to let a Sim age up. I do have rotations of a sort -- very loose ones. Notionally they're 1 day rotations, but I often stay with a household for two or three days (or more) if something interesting is happening. Similarly I'll often play a household out of sequence, if it suits the story, or even if I just want to spend some time with those Sims. I see some of my Sims as special friends, and I like to hang out with them. With aging off, things can't get out of sync, and I don't have Seasons, so nothing at all to worry about there! To determine the order for my loose rotations, I keep a note of what's happening in each "family" using the game's Storytelling feature. I simply check the file dates, and see who's not been played for a long time. Next in line to be played in Veronaville I see are the Summerdreams, last played on 3rd June 2016! So a rotation there can take 3 years! So what?! As long as I enjoy it and my Sims enjoy it.

I prefer aging off to any of the life-span mods, because I simply can't bear the thought of my Sims only having so many days to live. They're not terminal cancer patients!. I see them as essentially individuals much like myself, and I like to think they have as much right to a long and fulfilling life as I have. :lovestruc

@PinkDynamite:


The lot sync timer is just something to track a household with. It doesn't affect their grades or ability to raise them-that depends on if you play a shorter Uni time or not.

Until recently I had "harder grades" by Ancient Highway in my game and that really did do a number on the grades! I took it out because they were all failing their classes and I'm not gonna have a bunch of college dropouts in Tinsel Town!

What does affect the ability to raise the grades is whether or not they're motivated to get them, and possibly on the Dean's list-with just 24 hours (mod) it can be challenging to get them there, within the time span allotted for each semester.

Oh, by the way, in case nobody's mentioned it, if a YA gets put on 'academic probation', they automatically have to repeat the semester. So that can extend their ability to increase their grades.

@CoffeenSimming you could change your season length instead of the sims ageing if its the seasons bugging you.
http://www.modthesims.info/d/504883...length-mod.html
or the Season jar which you can change manually.

or there is an aging mod set around the seasons http://www.modthesims.info/d/449593...ed-version.html



Yeah, that's a bit of a pain. my YA have 2 days free so they can use that, but after that I have to start subtracting days off Adult Life span which is difficult with the simblender and turn off ageing as I can easily mess it up.

Is there a mod that can take off or add just one day at a time?