More Awesome Than You!

(would probably include Young Adults in the title as well)

I have read endless complaints about how Toddlers and Teens are missing from the game. The thing with Toddlers is more direct, the baby jumps to the kid stage skipping Toddlers entirely.

With Teens it's different, we have teen Sims, indistinguishable from adults or young adults, so that, visually, kids just go from kids to adults, skipping entire life stages.

Yadda yadda.

What I would like to know, is if this can be fixed somehow by the modding community. People talk about it as if something could be done about it. I have no idea, but can assume Toddlers would basically be out of the question, as it'd require custom meshes and whole animations and code to be added to the game, and it'd probably be for nothing as toddlers can't just work like in previous iterations of the game because there's no framework for them.

But what about Teens? Can the meshes in the game be edited somehow to make them "shorter", and make the already available animations fit them as they are? Again, I have no idea, but at least this sounds monumentally more plausible than adding back toddlers.

I would like to know if there's any interest on the modding community for this (have only heard opinions from players but nothing about technical possibilities.)

Otherwise, I didn't expect Ghosts to be added in a patch, is it possible that we will get toddlers and/or teens in a patch, or in a [The Sims 4: Life Stages] expansion? I could imagine the developers milking this, as we could have a full range of ages (say, young kid, old kid, young teen... stages - or even, a gradual aging of the sim without clear separation of stages), but also, if they "fixed" that teens just look like adults, it would be like EAxis admitting that it was a mistake from the beginning and that if they had more time they could have made those stages more visually different or added the toddler stage, so I'm skeptical.

The bigger question with the missing identifiability of 12s is how you avoid them when pursuing the goals of Romance-type sims. Is there some UI option to allow you to avoid pedobait?

I wouldn't mind betting that EAxis did this deliberately to reduce the amount of clothing they had to mesh, not to mention slightly different changes to animations due to the slight height differences.  Just sounds like EAxis being lazier than ever.

To be fair, they were barely distinguishable to begin with, but HOW DO WE AVOID BEING CREEPY PEDOS NOW?

The one word answer to your question is Yes. The somewhat longer answer is that romantic interactions are available only between two 12s, or between 24s, 48s, and 72s (?) in any combination. That is, unless one is running the TS4 kitten-killer.

Which of course has been available for a while now.

All that said, I agree that teens seem just like skinny adults that go to school rather than to work. I also fail to see the point (absent a University EP) of distinguishing between young adults and mature adults, which are identical except for subtle changes to the body shape and face.

That all this is begging for an Awesome type TS4 rendition of Pedostalker and Pedobait Sims, complete with jail time, goes without saying.

ETA:
Yes, or 72s. I realized later that I'd screwed that up.

There are no 64s. They are 60s or 66s.

The changes to the face are apparent enough, making sims uglier than they should be (specially if you download a carefully designed sim and aging stretches their face ruining it) so I had to download a mod to stop the abominating of sims.

With the latest patch that added the new careers they also added the lifestage to the nameplate of a Sim that appears when you hover over them in Live mode. So instead of

[Sim Name]

you now get

[Sim Name]
[Lifestage]

I see they realized the creepy pedo issue also.