The Sims 4 Elders: The Final Life Stage

Elders in The Sims 4 are the 7th and final life stage and it’s often hard to figure out what to do with your elders once you get there. They can be a completely ignored life stage for many players and it seems like the EA hasn’t added much elder-specific content to make the life stage more interesting.

You won’t notice a ton of differences in the day-to-day game play between an elder and a young adult or adult sim, except their bladder and energy needs seem to decay a lot faster than before.

How Long is a Life Span?

If you’re playing the Sims 4 with a normal lifespan, your sim will become an elder on day 100 of their life. Unlike previous versions of the game, you won’t be shown how many days the elder sim has until they die, you’ll only be shown how long they have been alive.

You’ll even be given a notification in the right hand corner a few days before your sim is going to pass away that will let you know that they are nearing the end of their days.

If you’ve gotten the Long Lived Trait from the Body Builder Aspiration, your sim will live substantially longer than other sims, maybe even long enough to see their children become elders, sometimes even passing after their children are already gone.

Making Children as an Elder

Your elder sims can even become parents if you want them to. An elder female is only able to adopt to become a parent and can adopt as late into her life as she wants, but you should probably make sure that your children will have someone to take care of them when your elder passes.

Elder male sims can still woohoo with female sims to make children, as long as the female is an adult or young adult. They can also adopt kids if they choose!

Things Elders Can Do

There are only a few things that elders can do that adults, or young adults can’t do. The first is to retire from their careers. When a sim becomes an elder they will be given the option on their computer or their phone to to retire from job and they will be given a bit of retirement money each day that is around half of what they were making per day before.

An elder can also get dangerously tired which can lead to death from overexertion. If you get your sim to exercise (or woohoo) they are going to need a lot of time after the fact so they can recover and start to regain their strength. If you force your sim to do something else that may add to their overexertion, they may die rather quickly.

The next thing they can do that no one else can is to walk slowly, most sims move rather quickly and can zoom from room to room. An elder sim will walk extremely slowly and sometimes get in the way.

And of course, an elder is the only life stage who is able to die from old age.

Ways That Elders Can Die In The Sims 4

There are two specific ways that an elder can die in The Sims 4 that no other age group can die from:

Dying From Overexertion

If you make your elderly sim participate in strenuous activities (i.e., exercise or woohoo) they will get dangerously tired and will feel uncomfortable. If you try and get your sim to do one more activity of the sort, they will die of overexertion which can’t be done by any other type of sim.

Dying of Old Age

Once your sim’s age bar starts to turn bubbly they will have approximately 48 hours until they are going to pass from old age. When the time comes, the sim will wave as a way to say goodbye to their nice, long life, and they will have a mist all around them. As with all deaths in the Sims 4, the grim reaper will come to see them and will turn the sim into an urn.

How to Save an Elder From Dying

When your elder sim dies you have the opportunity to plead for their life. If the grim reaper is in a decent enough mood he might just save their life, however, if he is in the slightest negative mood, he will ignore you. This will give your elder sim a day longer to live!