How to Stop Aging and Extend Lifespans in Paralives
There is absolutely no reason to let your carefully crafted digital roommates expire when the game gives you a literal pause button for death.
I hate the inevitable march of time, especially after I just spent three hours meticulously designing a character's jawline in the creator menu. If you just finished building the perfect avatar using my Paralives Paramaker Character Creation Guide, the last thing you want is for them to drop dead a few weeks later. The circle of life eventually comes for everyone in this simulation, but you hold the keys to the universe. You do not have to sit around and watch your creations wither away. You can completely freeze the aging process, manipulate the exact length of their lifespan, or tweak how fast a minute passes in the real world.
Tracking the Inevitable
Before you start messing with the space-time continuum, you need to know how the game actually tracks age. Paralives breaks a digital life down into eight distinct stages.
The Eight Life Stages
You progress from Baby to Toddler, Child, Pre-Teen, Teen, Young Adult, Adult, and finally Elder. If you want to know exactly how much time your character has left before they transition to the next phase, open their profile from the side menu. Click on the little figure icon located on the right side under their name.
Reading the Lifespan Bar
This profile menu shows you exactly what life stage is coming up next. If you hover your mouse over the lifespan bar, the game tells you the exact number of in-game days remaining. You will also notice that younger characters like Children and Pre-Teens have segmented lifespan bars. These distinct chunks represent specific growth spurts they will hit as they get older.
Pulling the Plug on Death
Turning off aging makes your characters completely immortal. They will stay trapped in their current life stage forever. If you want a static household where nobody ever dies, this is your golden ticket.
The Storyteller Settings
To stop the clock, click the three dots in the top right corner of your screen to open the options menu. Head into the Storyteller section and select Custom Storyteller. As I mentioned in my Paralives Storytellers Guide, these narrators govern all the background math of your world. Look under the Time subheading and find the toggle labeled "Household Paras Age." Turn that off.
The Neighborhood Quirk
You need to know about a very weird quirk in how these narrators operate. When you start a game, every single default narrator automatically has aging turned ON for your active household. However, the setting for "Non-Household Paras Age" is always turned OFF by default. This means if you do not touch the settings, your characters will eventually age and die while the random strangers next door stay perfectly young forever. If you actually want the rest of the town to age alongside you, you have to manually turn the Non-Household aging setting on.
Stretching the Clock
If eternal immortality feels a little too unnatural for your playthrough, you can just stretch out the clock instead. Extending the duration of your life stages gives you plenty of time to max out careers and hobbies without feeling rushed.
Adjusting Durations
Navigate back to that same Custom Storyteller menu. Look for the "Duration of Life Stages" setting. You have three choices. Picking Short drastically cuts down your time on earth. Normal is the baseline default. Long practically turns your life into an absolute marathon. While you are in this menu, you can also adjust the "Minutes Per Real-Life Seconds" slider. This literally changes the speed of the game clock, allowing you to make individual days last significantly longer.
The Cheater's Way Out
If you do not want to mess with the global Storyteller settings and just want granular control over one specific character, you can bypass the rules entirely with console commands. You can manually force a character into the next life stage, trigger their growth spurts on command, or simply revive someone who met an untimely end. I put together a full list of these commands in my Paralives Cheats Guide: Every Console Command Explained so you can break the game with confidence.
The Aging Math
If you are curious about the exact math behind the aging durations, I have the full breakdown below.
