Time flies when you’re having fun! Or waiting for the Sims 4 to load… Either way, it’s easy for time to get away from us and that includes our sims. Luckily for them at least, we can effectively pause time so they stop aging. Do you want to learn the secret of eternal life for your sims? Keep reading!
Learn How to Stop Aging in The Sims 4 (without Cheats)!
There used to be a cheat for pausing aging in the game but in my testing this cheat no longer functions; that’s okay though because we can easily shut off aging for our sims right from the game menu!
On PC/Mac:
Disabling aging on PC/Mac is super easy. Open up the menu from the upper right corner of the screen or by pressing the ESC key. From there, you’ll want to select Game Options and then choose the Gameplay tab on the left side. You will see several choices. If you want to truly stop aging for the entire world, set Auto Age (Played Sims) to “No” and uncheck the box for Auto Age (Unplayed Sims).
You can leave aging on for unplayed sims without affecting your own characters, but you might find yourself in for a shock when one day your sim’s best friend or love interest is suddenly too old for them or even dead from old age! If you use the Neighborhood Stories feature a lot I would recommend keeping aging on for your worlds if you don’t want homes to fill up with sims that won’t die, but that’s entirely up to you.
Turning off aging acts as a “pause” function on sims’ lifespans so if you change your mind in the future and want to resume aging, sims will continue on with their lives as if nothing happened so there are no ill effects for toggling it on and off (assuming no bugs or glitches are present). Don’t forget though that your Sims can still die from other causes not related to aging!
The best thing about the aging option(s) is that you can have different aging/lifespan settings for each individually saved game, so you can play multiple games with multiple lifespan configurations depending on your mood!
On Console:
Unfortunately there does not appear to be a way to stop aging on the console, even though the game lessons cover it like they do on PC/Mac. In the image below (which was taken on an Xbox One X after the March 2023 update), the orange arrow is showing us where the game option menu should be, but the green arrow I’ve added shows that the menu options are not the same as what’s portrayed in the Lesson. It’s a little hard to see the details but it’s obvious that the game menu for console is significantly smaller than the PC/Mac version.
If you use a console it’s worth checking yourself just in case, but it looks like EA just ported over the PC/Mac lessons without adjusting them for console limitations. Either that or they forgot to add the Options menu to console and nobody has ever noticed!
Long Lifespan
It’s worth noting that you can have aging on but still make your sims take a long time to get old, if you want them to still age but have plenty of time to play with them until they do. This is the best option if you want your game to actually progress while having enough time for your sims to build skills, relationships, earn job promotions, etc. Set Auto Age (Played Sims) to “Yes” and then select the Long Lifespan.
While a sim’s lifespan can be affected by things that happen throughout their corporeal time, the Long lifespan still isn’t messing around. The typical lifetime of a sim from birth to death on Long lifespan (including the infant stage) is nearly 370 days! So keep that in mind if you don’t want your sims to age up too soon, but you don’t want it to stop happening entirely.
In Conclusion
If you’re someone who likes to play with your sims as characters that never age, it’s very simple to disable the aging process for them if you’re on PC or Mac. Even if you just tweak it to be as long as possible, it’s amazing what your sims can accomplish when they’re not competing against the sands of time! Keep your characters young forever, or for at least a really, really long while. Take that, Grim!
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