How to age up in The Sims 4 & Cheat (2024)

The Sims franchise has always been popular for its realistic gameplay, and one of the things that contributes the most to this realism is the sim’s ageing. Like in real life, your characters would also age from babies to elders, and you can experience all these phases as the game progresses. There is an option to disable your sim’s ageing in the settings, but there might be times when you wish for your sims to age faster. So, in that case, there are several things that you can do to skip a particular ageing stage of your character. 

This article will focus on how to age up Sims 4. You can try these ways and choose which one works the best for you.

How to Age Up Sims 4

If your sims don’t age, the game might become stagnant. The reason that the players are so invested in their character’s life is because of the game’s attention to detail. If you’ve disabled the ageing setting in the game, then your sims won’t age until you manually do it. So here are the methods to to age your sims manually. 

Allow the Sims to Naturally Age Up

If you don’t want to use shortcuts or cheats to age up your characters, then it’s best not to do anything and let life take its course. You’d receive a notification once it’s your sim’s birthday, and they’d automatically age up. This process might happen offscreen. However, if you miss the notification and don’t throw a birthday party for your sim, then they’ll get a sad moodlet. 

The ageing up process would vary based on your sim’s lifespan that you’ve selected. So the time before ageing might not be the same for each life stage. 

Change the Lifespan Setting

So if you’re impatient for your sim to grow up faster, but you don’t want to use cheats or celebrate their birthday sooner, then your last resort would be to change your sim’s lifespan setting to short, and this way, they’d age faster. 

Don’t Let Your Sims Become Pregnant

Another way to let your sims age naturally is to not let them get pregnant because once a sim becomes pregnant, their ageing stops until they give birth. Since pregnancy is another interesting aspect of a sim’s life, this would be a tough call. 

Bake a Birthday Cake

The easiest way to age up toddler Sims 4 is to bake a cake for them. In addition, if you’ve a higher skill level in cooking, there’d be more variety of cakes to choose from. To bake a cake, click on the oven, select “Cook” and choose “Cake.” Once the cake is ready, add candles to them, and the moment your sim blows the candles, they’ll age up. In the case of toddlers, click on the adult who can help them blow the candles instead. 

Throw a Birthday Party

You can think of this option as an extension of the previous one. To celebrate your sim’s ageing, you can throw a full-out party for them with food, drinks, and lots of people. To do so, go to your phone, click “Plan a Social Event,” and choose “Birthday Party.” Select the sim you want to throw the party for and the people you want to invite. There’d be a list of goals you’d have to complete, such as telling jokes, playing a game, etc. These goals would change according to parties, and the people invited can help you achieve these goals. Also, it’s essential to have a birthday cake; otherwise, it wouldn’t be a birthday party, right? 

Put Your Sim Under Stress

So this isn’t an ideal option because it makes you put your sim under stress. After all, they age faster when they feel stressed out, just like in real life. If your sim’s in an accident, they’d feel duress; however, ensure that the accidents don’t end up taking your sim’s life. For instance, if your sim is an elder, even a little stress could be dangerous for them. If they woohoo more, that could also age them up or kill them. 

Click on the Crib

When it comes to babies, ageing them up is quite an easy task. Babies require a lot of work, like feeding them, changing their diapers, and so on, so it’s okay if you wish to age them up. All you have to do is click on their crib and select the option “Age up.” Once you do so, the baby would be replaced with a toddler. You can now sell the crib or keep it for another baby if you want. 

Cheats Age Up

If you don’t want to try any of the ways above, then you can opt for cheat codes. Click on Ctrl + Shift + C to open the cheat console, input “testingcheats true,” and then type “cas.fulleditmode.” Now you can choose the sim you want to age up through Shift and click. Once you’ve done this, select “Modify in CAS,” so that you can easily age up your sims in the future as well. 

Visit Another Household

A more fun way of ageing up your sims is to visit another sim’s house and let your child play with other children. This would develop a mutual bond and friendship, but it’d also help age up your sim. You can select the baby and age it up. 

Choose the Right Flower Arrangement

Flower arranging is considered a hobby in Sims 4, and your sim can become an expert in it with practice. They can even gift these flowers to others. However, there is one flower that could help age up your sim, known as the “Death Flower.” If an elderly sim receives this flower, they might end up dead. It can work well for young sims, though. 

Play with Another Household Temporarily

If you wish to switch things up a bit and make the game more exciting, you can leave your household unattended for a while and switch to a new one. If you don’t change the settings, the sims in your first household will continue to age up, and the elder sims might even die while you focus on your other family. 

Use Mods

Sims 4 offers the players numerous mods for various things, and some of these mods help your sims age up as well. The Age Manipulator mod is one such option that would help you in ageing up your character, whenever you want. You would have to download this mod first, though. 

Ageing Down Sims 

Now that we know all about ageing up your sims, it’s also necessary to know the options to reduce their age. 

Potion of Youth – 

Potion of Youth is an aspiration reward, which would reset your sim to the beginning of their current age once they buy and drink it. For example, if it’s a teen who has lived 15 days of her teenage life, then this potion would reset her age to the beginning of adolescence. But this potion won’t reduce their age in the sense that an adult can’t become a teenager. 

Essence of Life  – 

The Essence of Life is a drink that you can get from the carnivorous Cow Plant. If the Cow Plant eats a sim, it’ll produce an essence of that dead sim, and if you make another sim drink it, they’ll become younger, and their life span would increase. 

Conclusion 

These are all the ways that you can age up your sims and enjoy the phase of their life that you want to. No more listening to crying babies or tantrums of your teen sims; you can just age them up whenever you want because now you know how to age up Sims 4. This is one of the best features of Sims 4, and you must use it at least once. So give any of these options a try, and see the result. 

Happy Simming!