Time Flies With The Sims 4 Gradual Aging mod! — SNOOTYSIMS (2024)

Don’t let the Elder life stage sneak up on you anymore! The Gradual Aging mod is here to add more realism to the passage of your sims’ lifetime.

When The Sims 1 launched back at the turn of the millennium, sims only came in 2 ages: child and adult. The concept of time passing didn’t fully exist, and your sims would forever stay the same age. Needless to day, things have changed quite a bit over time! When The Sims 2 University came out we first got Young Adults and since then, the transition period between Young Adults, Adults, and Elders has been kind of tricky.

Going by the timeline established in TS2, a Young Adult is college aged (late teens to late 20’s roughly) which means that the Adult life stage exists as a bridge between youth and Elder, but spans an awful long time. Your sim isn’t going to look or feel the same at age 35 as they will at age 60, and oftentimes you might find yourself caught off-guard when suddenly it’s time for an Adult sim to age up. Even if you consider “Young Adult” to span a larger amount of time, adulthood is a long while and you go through many, many changes over the years.

The Gradual Aging Mod Lets Time Pass More Realistically

The Gradual Aging Mod by JaneSimsten lets your sims show signs of aging over time, making the transition period between Young Adulthood and becoming an Elder much more realistic, predictable, and far less jarring. It works by applying overlays to your sim’s face for wrinkles, under eye bags, crows feet, and more, and these overlays slowly fade in deeper and deeper as time goes by. You will notice your sim looking older as the days pass and they may even get a buff about it as they notice their body changing.

If your sim can’t handle the idea of looking older they can purchase the “Ageless” Rewards Store Trait which will make them exempt from receiving the overlay, making their aging process behave how it does in vanilla game play.

Add-Ons – Grey Hair And Treatments

Aging brings more than just wrinkles, and there are optional add-ons with the mod that recognize this. The Gradual Aging Mod includes and optional hair greying mechanic, which means grey hairs will start gradually showing up on your sim’s head. There are also 2 treatments available, one for greying hair and one to reduce wrinkles, but like many things in The Sims 4 there’s always a chance one of these treatments will backfire on your sim and give them a nasty rash/burn!

Known Bugs

There are currently 2 bugs we know of in regards to the mod, one “intentional” and one unintentional. The overlay for making your sims’ hair grey was designed to look good on as many Maxis hairs as possible, but there’s a chance it won’t work on all of them. Things get more complicated when you bring CC hair into the mix as UV mapping can vary from hairstyle to hairstyle, and CC from other categories like jewelry might overlap which can result in strange color blocking. It’s for these reasons JaneSimsten chose to make the greying hair package optional.

In addition there have been reports of the system causing problems with the hair growth mechanic that was introduced with High School Years. Most of the kinks seem to have been worked out but there’s a possibility the mod will interfere with sims growing a beard. This has only been reported by one user so far, but it’s something to keep in mind if you’re trying out the Gradual Aging mod.

More on SNOOTYSIMS: Make teens feel more unique from their older counterparts with some special mods just for them!

Conclusion

The Gradual Aging mod is a great tool for players of The Sims 4 who want more realism regarding how their characters age and grow. Time passing feels much more organic, and (you along with) your sims won’t suddenly be caught off-guard by the notification that they will be aging up to Elder soon. Looking at your Adult sims, you’ll easily be able to gauge where they are in their adulthood instead of them looking the same while their younger relatives grow up around them.

Do you like the aging system in The Sims 4? What would you change about it? Let us know in the comments, and enjoy the mod!

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