More Awesome Than You!

I know, maybe I'm a callous bitch (er, that's pretty likely), but the idea of my pets living for 20-some sim days as an adult bugs me.  I want to adopt a kitten on the same day that I have a Simkid, and then have that kid cry when Mittens dies before she starts college.  I did a search and it looks like TwoJeffs had plans to do an age duration hack at one point, but I haven't found anything.  Is that still in the works?  Has anyone else done a similar hack? 

I want the same hack. Pets seem to live way too long in game for my tastes. My oldest sim in a household now is 60 days old, and has had pets since his birth, and he's only gone through two sets of pets (one dog, one cat then two dogs). Theres one dog left from the previous set (a litter of puppies) whose bound to die in my game today. Dogs live the max of what, 16 years in real life? By my count he should be on the 3rd or 4th pet at this point.

I want to start adopting strays to get the population down as well (I have pescados No Stray Respawns) and shorter lifespans would be a great help at culling them.

You can get my birthday cake (there are versions with or without the anti-ageing patch) and with that you can choose when any sim or pet ages up to the next stage including dying.

Alternatively I have created an isolated "agecons" BCON that you can edit with your prefered life stage durations.

Look on http://simlogical.com/dinnerbell/index.php

Excellent! Thanks a ton Inge, both for the link and your hard work. Now I can finally get all those strays off the streets without waiting half a sim's life.

Well, shit.  I have your cake!  I just didn't know it worked for pets.  Would Merola's mind control mirror work, then? 

And ... uh... your second sentence appears to be in English, but it doesn't make any sense to me.  :)

Merope you need the latest cake of course, so make sure you have it.  For pets, you just use one of your selectable human sims and he will get the menu for ageing the pets, so you don't need the pet to be selectable.

The BCON I mentioned is the one that holds the tuning details about lifestages.   I simply extracted it from objects.package and put in whatever labels we happen to know about to make it a bit more convenient.

Ah, gotcha.  Thank you!

And I don't want to edit my game files -- I'm happy with my non-BFBVFS game.  I might try it later, but SimPE is completely unintuitive and slow and terrifies me a little.  So I'll just have little Fluffy put to sleep via your cake.

Really want I want is for TwoJeffs to do the work for me. 

I concur. It's so much easier with a global hack like the one for simmies (which I appreciate a great deal; stupid elders living forever). Besides, I prefer for it to happen on its own so that I don't feel like I'm killing my poor pets on purpose.

Well I prefer the flexibility and on-the-fly choice because I have families of different importance and purpose.  Some are meaningful like my self-sim and family and my friends, others are just there to provide backdrop and I might want to reconfigure them rapidly, or use them in test scenarios.  My own family is permanently non-ageing.

I think if you are playing a whole neighbourhood seriously, you might want a fixed consistent way of ageing.

Fortunately there are as many different hacks for these things as there are playing styles :)

Part of the reason pet lifespans are the way they are is that if pets dropped dead with an average lifespan of 12 days or so, the turnover rate would be very high and you'd get a lot of DEAD CHARACTER FILES everywhere. Huge mess.

I think I'd rather use the cake and pretend the pet died from eating a houseplant or something...

Oh, right.  And the more dead pets, the sooner the apocalypse.  Gotcha. 

Okay!  Fewer pets for everyone!

I don't mind the age duration so much as I do the large litter size. Every time I want my pets to breed, I get 3 new kittens. Realistic, but dear lord, what am I going to do with so many kittens? I don't want to spam the adoption pool with a million kittens just so I can have a family line for the cats.

LOL! :D  Over here, I'm ranting at my pets because so few of them are ready to breed any puppies or kittens.  My biggest 'hood could easily absorb 20 or 30 puppies/kittens.  Just shows how differently we all play.

As for the impending doom of BFBVFS due to short pet lives, I say feh.  Supposedly my oldest 'hood has been doomed from the beginning when I deleted a cheating ex-wife and her baby out of the sim bin.  They were related to one of my founding sims, and the ex knew everyone in the 'hood so I'm not sure how I could have made it any worse.  I'm ready to let the 'hood go if it happens but in the meantime, I intend to play exactly the way I want.  :P

You could use christianlov's puppy/kitten creator from over at MTS2. You can select the parents and it only creates one baby pet at a time.

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=198705

How about a "put pet to sleep" mod.  I know nothing about how to make a mod, or if any of this is even possible, but there are a lot of ways I can see this playing itself out.  You could take your doomed friend "for a walk" one last time to visit the vet, but when you show up at your house again the pet isn't with you anymore (i haven't had any pets die yet, so i don't know if they get an urn or what... if so, maybe an urn or the equivalent in your inventory when you get back).  How about an option for a visit from whoever confiscates your neglected pets so they can put them to sleep for you.  A clickable object that kills it humanely (maybe catnip or a rubber bone that has a lethal sedative in it).  Any other ideas from the group?

Hmmm, I don't know about 'put pet to sleep' hacks, but Christianlov at MTS2 has a pet age-changer thing. The only pets that have died in my game were CAS pets that began as adults, and they didn't seem to have overly long lifespans, IMO. These particular sims got their pets shortly after they, themselves, were created in CAS, and the pets died shortly after the sim-kid reached childhood. Btw, pets get an urn or a headstone, depending on whether they die indoors or out, just like sims do. Maybe I'm just weird or overly sentimental, but I love my sim-pets, and am sad to see them die (unlike my sims, whom I regularly kill off).

Edited for stupid grammar

I also use this. It's actually quite awesome.  You don't have to hassle with the pets getting along with everyone in the world before they mate and you only get one spawn, instead of an entire litter.

I use Christianlov pet changer.  It ages them or kills them. 

 http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=200422