Right now I'm doing 3 sim days=2 years at uni. I'm thinking about switching to just 3 days=the entire time at uni. Seems like its too short though. I'm trying to calculate how old their parents will be when they get out and their siblings and etc. It doesn't seem like it'll keep them close in age :s But then again my sims had their children later then they usually have this time I played.

Just as curious as to what you guys do! & please add if you have any age duration mods that change your the one in the game too. I'm really looking into making the adult life longer so my sims can meet their grandchildren :P

I normally calculate my university time as one sim day = one year of university, which makes the whole of their university degree last for four sim days (in actuallity, twelve days at three days a year).

I use an edited age duration mod offered by Simlogical (age group tweak). 2 days for babies, 3 for toddlers, 8 for children (unchanged), 7 for teens, 35 for adults, and 15-25 for elders makes it so that one sim day is the equivelant of one real year. I've found that cutting days from teens and adding them to adults helps get them to university quicker, and on to the marriage and baby-making I'm a bit too fond of (although at the moment I'm waiting about a week in-game once my sims hit adult before they have children -- I've had a few teen and young adult accidental pregnancies thanks to ACR and InTeen, so I've had some pretty young grandparents in my game).

One complete uni year equals one Sim-day in my rotation. I don't have any aging mods anymore...but some of my older sims are still affected by the one I've recently taken out, so they'll die sooner than the unaffected ones.

For me, each base neighborhhood rotation consists of two Sim-days, so in Uni, 48 hours there = 2 Sim-days (dah!).

While I have Sims at college, the Sims in the main neighborhood do not age, because for me, University is a "pocket" of time.

When your teen is ready to age to adult, you have two options--age them to adult or send them to college. What if you have a pair of twins and you send one and not the other? That's how I look at it.

When my Sims graduate from college, they return to the neighborhood the same time they left. If they age up on a Friday night, they are back before Saturday 6 pm.

I find it really helps to let go of the idea that sim ages and lifestages can be correlated closely with human ones at all. Those three days of pregnancy throw off all the other stages.

My rotations are all one day, but I do three rotations at Sim State for every one in Downtown and Drama Acres. That's about my play comfort: I don't want to spend more time than that away from my main hood, but I do like taking advantage of the expanded university calendar and it gives me a comfortable overlap among age cohorts. Sharla Ottomas was two sim days younger than Luis Iana, so he was a junior when she was a freshman. They had plenty of time to get together, and she was still two sim days younger when she graduated. It does mean that the sister who was a toddler when Pigeon Hawkins left for University was a teen by the time she returned, but that's where accepting that sim lives are different comes in.

Of course I then throw things off by using the elixir to give people extended adult spans to deal with the fact that all my core adults started with teen children who went straight to University, but that's all right as along as I remember rough relative ages and which age cohort people belong to. And I certainly don't try to make everyone have the exact same number of days as adults - that doesn't happen in real life either. Some of us show our ages faster than others.

So my advice is to let go of the attempt to synch sim ages with real ages and concentrate on your play comfort zone. How long does it take you to burn out on playing a single lot? A neighborhood? How long does it take you to lose track of what's going on in Neighborhood A while you're playing Subhood B? Adjust your play calendars to switch shortly before the burn-out point, and figure out how best to spread yourself around.

One thing I've thought of that I have decided to experiment with in my (very rare) playings of Strangetown, where I dumped all the student bin students into dorms, and moved in all the family bin sims who were either Strangetown-specific or had children, is to do house 1 in the hood followed by House 1 at La Fiesta Tech, House 2 in the hood and House 2 at La Fiesta Tech, etc. There's more households in the neighborhood than at University, so University time should still be accelerated, but at an entirely different (and variable) rate, and the rotations won't be aligned like they are at Drama Acres/Sim State. Maybe it'd work, maybe it wouldn't, but the only way to find out is to try.

I haven't gotten any mods to reduce/extend timing on anything but I do plan to. So I don't really do any calculating yet...

I play uni students on the same 3 day rotation as the rest of the hood.

I don't try to think of Sim ages in terms of Human ages so what i usually do is play one rotation in my main hood/sub-hood/Downtown playing each lot for one Sm week, and sending all eligible teens from that hood to College. I then play one two term college rotation which advances all the students in college, before adding all the new students into the college, so that my universities never become empty of students, and like in real life there are students in the Univerity at different points in their educational career mingling together.

Once I do the whole college rotation I move on to the next sub-hood in my neighborhood and repeat the process above with the exception of moving any recent graduates back into the hood at the end of the rotation, before returning to Uni to do another two terms. Of course if there's ever a student deficit in Uni, I will then use the move Sims to uni to move all available teen townies to university, which keeps my neighborhood from suffering from too-many-pretty-Sim syndrome since I don't control what my townies look like.

I just downloaded a mod that adjusts each semester to last for 1 sim-day, which is as close to on-par as I'm going to get with my 7-day cycle in the course of my rotation. I just think about the unbalanced ages as lifespans: for example, David and Thomas went to university, while the rest of their sisters (one as triplet, three younger) did not. The triplet sister is now dead of old age, and one younger sister is already far into her elder years, while David and Thomas aren't even elder age yet. I just think of it as David and Thomas have naturally-longer lifespans, and they'll likely outlive all of their sisters at this rate.

I count the four years of uni as one season back home. That said, I have a devil of a time trying to keep the age differences between sims intact, because I like having new sims come into the university every other year or so, to keep my Greek houses populated. My solution is to play all the houses forward a rotation, but then work teens into the university in a staggered way.

One day in the main hood equals one semester at Uni. My semesters are only 36 hours long each though, because otherwise I get bored. When they graduate they are aged 9 days with the Sim Blender (8 semesters plus the party semester). This means a non-uni bound twin should still be the same age.

The issue comes with babies born in university because they are getting 36 hours of aging for every 24 hours in the main hood. I can fix this when the family moves off campus, or I can just pretend in my storyline that the child was born earlier in the University sequence (semester 5 rather than 7, say) than they actually were.

I once had a baby on a uni lot and hse was a child before they left lol!

Anywho I think Ill just keep doing what Im doing

Im such a control freak so I ALWAYS have to know what equals what but you guys are right I cant compare their ages to our ages :D

I tried for the longest time to perfect the amount of time they spend in uni to correspond with the rotation of their families left at home, but in the end I just gave up... now I finish their entire university career in one go, then when they move back home I resume rotating, as if they turned from teenager to adult as they would without uni. Works fine for me.

I count uni as 1 rotation, which is one season (five days.) Sims who don’t go to uni get an extra 5 days added to their adult life stage so everyone remains the same age. I add the extra days as soon as the sim grows up. Since I play multiple college students on the same lot, it can be a little confusing to remember which day each sim has left for college on. So, when a sim goes to college, I make a note in their bio of the day they will be coming back into the main hood.

I figure that a sim day roughly equates a year, so five days equals about five years for college, which is close enough to reality.



Their infant to teen years are unrealistic too. Their life span kind of evens out in the end though.

For me one uni semester = one simday in the main ´hood, and the time from when a sim starts uni until he/she graduates = 8 simdays in the main ´hood. Since one uni semester takes three sim days, it obviously takes me more time to complete a uni household. But I´m okay with that, since I really like the uni years. I send my teens to college when they have 8 days left as teens and when they graduate it has gone 8 days in the main ´hood. That way the aging doesn´t become messed up.

If and when I do rotate I play the Uni Sim for one semester which in my mind equals one Sim week back home. Considering real semesters are divded into only two in college.

I feel when I return to the main hood I should at least play that family left behind for one Sim week which may cause some children at home to age up since they age in 7 days making it more realistic.

That way by the time one Sim is in either in their last semester of sophmore year or first in junior year the child left at home may now be able to enter college behind their brother or sister. Which makes works for me. One as a Sophmore or early Junior and one just beginning college.

If I continue to do this then the adults at home are also aging when I play them and a little older. Note: I don't normally send teens to college until they are 5 days or less of aging up to adult. Unless they just get on my last nerve and I send them off and don't play them for a long time and no longer rotate because I didn't like that teen for whatever reason.

Add: also when that older Sim graduates, I take them back home and play them one Sim week maybe longer. I try not to have adult parents the same age as the first to return, they should be older. If I contiuded with my idea of rotation then this works out great considering they probably had these kids within the first two weeks or less of their own Adulthood when first starting the family. They would only be much older/elderly if they started their family late in life.

I play for 4 days per sim household in my regular hoods. Once a teenager reaches 8 days until adulthood I give them the option to go to 4 year college. They can choose to go or stay with their parents. If they choose to stay, I'll give them an option when they have 4 days left to go to "2 year college" (basically I drop them out after their 2nd year). If they choose to stay, they live out the rest of their teen days. In the college, I play 2 years (freshmen/sophomore, then junior/senior in the next play through). This way they stay in sync with the their peers who decide not to go to college.

I try to do one year in uni equals one day in the hood--since playing uni is not my favorite, I have a hack that shortens each semester to two days. Teens can then feed in when is appropriate--leave home on day three, you start uni after three years of play in the uni hood, and ages stay somewhat synced, for a certain value of sync.

I tend to worry more about keeping all the Sims I have at Uni in synch. When I rotate through my Uni I play one semester each house. What usually screws me up is one of my Sims hooking up with a dormie and then if I decide to move them in together. The dormie is only a freshman and my playable would usually be a Jr or Sr by that point sort of frustrating as they probably have been dating awhile.

I handle it one of two ways; either I fast forward them through their learning process using TJ's college lot adjuster to set their grade and exam time so they take the exam and move on, or I use the adjuster and just set them to the semester I want them to be in. The advantage of the first is they will have the memories from each semester and of course the money they might earn.

Depending on how many students I might have at Uni though I might also elect to leave them as a dormie and once my Sim moves back to the neighborhood just have them move in. Although then you get a Sim with no memories of all their dates, very few skill points if any and almost no money to speak of.

As for the synching with the main hood as long as I have family members graduating in the proper order I'm OK with it. I play a 3 day rotation per household and it all seems to work for me although I do try to keep Sims aging up in some sort of synch as well. For example one of my founding families the original Sims had 3 sons all of whom married and had families. Once I've decided it's time for them to become elders (no more green juice for you!) then I make sure they do so in their birth order.

Really it's what ever works for you, as long as I can justify it within my own story line in my head then I'm usually Ok with it.

I do wish their was an option two not go to Uni but also have that YA lifespan, this is not the same as having YA's live in the main hood.

This issue was the main reason I installed Squinge's mod for YA in main hood. I don't deal well with pockets of time or the complicated math that is required to translate Sim days into human years or what not. I didn't deal well with the double time Sims get when they visit com lots so you can only imagine what this time trouble meant for me, because this is a much more serious case of temporal disorder.

Without Squinge's mod though - had it never been created - I'd most probably freeze any adult's aging after they grew up from teen for the exact number of days it takes their counterparts in Uni sub-hood to get their diplomas. Again, my approach would be to seal any disorderly gaps in time-continuum by any means necessary, even if it took me a special sheet for keeping track of aging of each and every Sim that remained in my main hood.
(What can I say? Just like Captain Janeway's, temporal mechanics makes my head spin... and not in a good way either.)

If I have Sims I want to marry off that are two Sim days apart, I just start the older Sim out, and when they're a sophomore or junior, have the other Sim start college. Or if I feel like it I start them at the same time...say the guy ages up Wednesday evening, the girl Friday evening, after they graduate, send the guy to his parents' house, on Friday evening move the girl in, and get them married.

For me it's a detour. Besides, my pattern is raise the kids, once I get teens ready to transition, play university for the entire time, then back to the main 'hood once they graduate.

I also play 2 uni years=3 days in the main 'hood, but if a sim goes to university, I age them up six days. (I don't remember exactly which aging mod I have in, but my adults get 42 days.) After all, we don't get extra days added onto our life for going to university!

Actually, we do. Better-educated people live longer (on a statistical basis; obviously this varies with individuals), for various reasons.

Better educated people usually earn more money. And this isn't a *fun* fact. It isn't even remotely funny that some people get to live longer because of that.