Changes to Sullivan's calendar

As I mentioned in my last post, Round 19 in Sullivan will mark the debut of the new calendar system. It is based largely on the system used over at Lakeside Heights and at Riverdale but I've modified it a tiny bit to suit my own purposes.

One "round" will now be 2 years Sim-time (Rounds 1-18 were 5 years Sim-time), so Sims will now age 2 years each round. I will be tracking my hood by seasons, rather than by months. I've got my order of play all mapped out and as I have fewer than 24 households, it made more sense to me to track it by seasons.



A big catalyst for me switching to this system was the possibility for Sims to finally have pregnancies of a realistic length. With my system, they were pregnant for three years. Because I usually give my Sims at least a day's recuperation before getting them pregnant again, this meant most siblings were at least 5 years apart. A 5 year difference is fine but it's not realistic for me to have all my families have such a large gap in ages. My own sister is less than 3 years younger than me and I know of families where the kids are less than 2 years apart or even closer. So I'm looking forward to being able to replicate that in my hood.

Another major reason I'm switching is university. University lasts 4 years but I had to do a lot of fudging to avoid mentioning that *5* years passed while my Sims were away at university. This system will allow the University Sims to age right along with the rest of the hood, on the same "calendar".

Instead of visiting the college kids once at the end of every round, I will now visit them twice a round. This will take place each Autumn (university here generally starts in March, which is our autumn). It also means I can now send the kids when they're 18 and not at the end of whatever round it is when they happen to turn 18. I'm really happy that I'll now be able to have Sims at various stages of their education at college at the same time, rather than just freshmen and juniors.

What I'm most pleased about is the fact that for a whole play session, my Sims will be the same age. This system is going to eliminate a lot of little annoyances I'd run into when I was writing. I'd often find myself referring to something that happened "last night" and then realise that with my system, "last night" was actually also "last year"! I used to have to use a lot of vague language when referring to the passage of time and this won't be necessary any more.

I hope most of you are familiar enough with this sort of system from reading other blogs, so I'm not going to go into a technical explanation of exactly what I'm doing here. This post is more to explain my reasons than to provide an in-depth tutorial.

If I've confused any of you (entirely possible!), there's no need to worry. I will note the Sims' ages and what season and year we're in at the beginning of each post and the profiles will continue to be updated as always.