Age & Height

Let's have a frank discussion about age and The Sims 2. First let's discuss the age cycle.

There are technically 5 life cycles shown here. Guessing at their apparent age group you have the toddler (age 2), child(age 8), teenager (16), adult(32), and elder (let's say 64). Only 2 cycles missing are baby (not shown age (less then a year) and the young adult (roughly 21 years old) which is a transition age only used in the University Expansion when teenagers go to college.

The Sims 2 by default is a very tame game. Teens can only kiss other teens (when in love) and that is it. For those who want a realistic game of Sims you must use a hack to enable woohoo for teens. The core 3 hacks being:Woohoo Teens, the InTeenimater , or Autonomous Casual Romance. The Inteenimater is likely the most often used and tested. Teens will be able to woohoo and get pregnant after you install this hack. The pregnancy will show in the second and third trimesters if you choose clothing with the pregnancy mesh. Woohoo is allowed between Sims without being in love. No jealousy hack is also included. Also adults and teens can...you know...

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For those who wanted an even younger interaction they are unable to use these 3 teen hacks for them as they work for teenagers and none younger. However the one moderation that is possible is to use SimPe and to change the age of an in-game charcter. While this won't physically turn a child into a teenager it will create the mindset of a teenager in the character of a child and keeping the body the same. Only major drawback is a phenomenon called hovering. Since the child in the game thinks they are a teenager (if they are set to that in SimPe) they will be expected to have a similar height. The game adjusts to that by invisibly raising the character up about a foot. The picture shown to the right shows a characters side by side with a proper teenager and the difference between the two. Kind of a drag frankly...

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What I would personally recommend (if you are inclined) is the use of stretching (or also squishing if you want to be grammatically correct). This can be done two seperate ways, the temporary way is to highlight the sim you want to change, use boolprop (get the command line by using cntrl-shift-c) and then type in stretchSkeleton 0.80 to stretchSkeleton 1.20. as you can see here. If you are changing a child or an adult their default is 1.00, if its a teen then its .93 (because its basically a slightly shrunken adult). This is a temporary change and once you exit out of the game the adjustment is lost.

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A visual guide is here (along with many other hints) at my imagefap account. Don't use a value of less then 0.80 or higher then 1.20 of it'll look bad. Remember that squished teens still have curvy breasts and stretch children are still flat as boards. Teens will always taller too.

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A guide to changing the height of sims permanently with SimPE is here and here. This allows you to keep your characters teenagers, stops the hovering phenomenon, and allows you to use all the standard clothing that your teen character would usually wear. It does allow your teenager to be stretched taller or shorter so that your average looking 16 year old teen can look younger (say like 10 or 12). Both teens on the left are the exact same life cycle age of teenager and yet the redhead has been stretched to 80% of the standard size while keeping a realistic body shape. All the benfits of this change allows your teenager to act as a regular teenager with all the benefits. Works very well. It adds much needed variety.