How ‘The Sims 4’ Aging Bug Landed My Sim In A Geriatric Simpocalypse
Image Source: Player.One
Normally, I play The Sims 4 pretty vanilla. I’ll play for a little while, making a sim after myself and my significant other, add in one of my dogs (for obvious reason), and then go through the daily motions. And then something else grabs my attention, taking me away from the game, and it fades for a bit until yet another expansion comes out.
Rinse, repeat.
This time around, though, I took a cue from my wife and just decided to wing it. More open to randomness, if you will. So I decided to use the randomizer aspect of the Create-A-Sim. Meet Emmalyn.
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I bought a property and put Emmalyn in a tiny house. She enrolled in a university, and though I was trying not to simulate my life, Emmalyn ended up going for a psychology degree (I teach psychology). Emmalyn had no skills built, so I assumed that’s why admission did not let me pursue the “distinguished” degree route for psychology (do sims even get rejected from Uni in this game?). I was determined to have Emmalyn work hard to build up those skills and get that distinguished degree so she could start at a higher career track level.
Emmalyn learned the hard way that just going to class and doing the homework in college wasn’t going to cut it. She got kicked out for grades, and after doubling down on her skills, she re-enrolled, got that distinguished degree, and when she graduated, she joined the detective career track.
It was about this time that the new expansion, High School Years, came out. That was also when I learned about a couple of new bugs, one of which started to auto-age people up.
In The Sims 4, you can change the lifespan of sims in the game options. I usually go for a long lifespan just to have a longer playtime. For reference, the length of time between the beginning of young adulthood and adulthood in the game is 88 days. This particular bug was jumping the sims from one age level to another right away. So sims were going from childhood to adulthood in a couple of blinks of an eye. I most certainly had not played for 88 game days by the time the expansion update had been installed.
Well, by now, Emmalyn had fallen in love with a woman by the name of Jade Rose. Emmalyn proposed. They moved into her old tiny home, upgraded it a little, and settled into a nice life together. So Emmalyn would go to work, solve crimes, come home, cook, and life was going well.
Then I logged in, and suddenly, no matter what I did, Emmalyn and Rose would walk outside, spin around, and suddenly age up from young adulthood to adulthood. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I had been playing a while already and figured it was about time for Emmalyn and Jade to age up anyway. I played a while longer. Then, I called it for the night, saved, and exited the game.
The next time I logged in, however, the two of them walked back outside and aged up again. That’s when I knew something was up. I had only played through a couple of game days after the last issue, and there was no way my sims would age up to elder in that time.
Unfortunately, my saved games were also affected by this bug. Robbed of my playthrough and left with few options, I decided to cheat and de-aged my sims back to young adulthood, because why not? I aged Emmalyn and Jade back down to young adults and went on my merry way. Then, they aged up again the next time I logged back in. There was definitely a problem.
What I didn’t expect, however, or remember, was that NPC sims will age up as well. I soon realized the terrible effects of this bug.
By this time, content to de-age my sims if need be, I felt a change was needed. So Emmalyn broke it off with Jade and decided to wade back into the dating pool. Maybe she would meet someone at her gym. There were a lot of celebrities there after all. Emmalyn decided to phone an old fling of hers. There was a problem, though. He wasn’t showing up in her list of friends. At first, I thought there was nothing wrong. Perhaps they’d just fallen out of touch and therefore off her list of friends and contacts. Knowing the gym was a good place to find some action, she headed off to the gym. I noticed something was off within moments of getting to the gym.
As each moment went by, gray-haired sims entered the play area one by one. Unsure as to the sudden influx of geriatric sims, I decided to hover over their body to see what their names were, looking to see if they were familiars.
That’s when it hit me. The same aging bug that affected my sims had swept through the entire sims universe. Emmalyn’s NPC-populated world had become a simulated version of Florida, minus all the headlines of strange criminal activity. Everything started clicking. The lack of former lovers and friends in her contact list. The constant aging up. The lack of any children.
Then, the ghosts started calling.
As is typical in The Sims 4, people you meet call you from time to time for advice or to hang out. Despite having proposed to Jade, Emmalyn would still get calls from her college lovers, never able to completely settle down. Like the rest, at first, it was a little weird, but I’d noticed that when people die, their ghosts tended to hang around and socialize as if they didn’t realize they were dead. Except now they could possess objects and put a significant dent in a sim’s budget.
But then I noticed the ghostly caller was a former lover.
And then another ghost called.
And another.
And another.
On top of that, trying to play an online multiplayer game presented me with all my dead friends.
It quickly began to settle in that I was soon faced with the potential that my sim, and anyone that lived with her, could find themselves in a sims world of apocalyptic proportions: no one but gray-haired and spectral remains with which to socialize and potentially fall in love with again. It was a legit concern. I went into the world management screen and started hovering over properties that were occupied. Several were empty or home to ghosts. In large families, all that remained are the children, and anyone they coupled with or their children they’ve had.
And now her former paramour, Jade, had aged up as well. Emmalyn, whose rocky start in university had turned into a prosperous career, now found herself without those that had been along for the ride with her. She was faced with a future of having to search for new connections among the people who were her former friends’ children, now adults themselves, and the literal ghosts of her past haunting her days going forward.
Silver lining: There was a lot of extra real estate just waiting to be bought.
Cha-ching.
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