Fruit fly lifespan is disappointing

[IcicleFerret]

I have the game on Epic but I'm very disappointed that I'm managing a colony of fruit flies. I'm only 25 sols into a game and people are already dying of old age! Is there a "fix" for this?

[Ericus1]

You have completely misunderstood colonist life span and the age ranges specified for them.

https://survivingmars.paradoxwikis.com/Colonists#Age_Groups

The average colonist will live for 70+ Sols (which are a little less two earth years each), and reaches retirement age (Senior) at 61. There are also techs which can increase this, and a breakthrough that allows Seniors to keep working.

All colonists you are importing from Earth fall into an age range; their age is generated when they land to be anywhere within that range. So when you are importing "Middle Aged" colonists they could show up on Mars being 59 Sols old and have as little as 1 Sol of productive life ahead of them.

You need to be paying more attention to who you're importing from Earth. Try to only import Youths or Adults to ensure they have a much longer productive life span. This is also why breeding Martianborn is so important: not only do they have the entire lives ahead of them to be productive, there are a number of techs that enhance and improve them.

[IcicleFerret]

I get that about ages, but the game files say a martian sol is about 25 earth hours. Even the wiki you're referencing says a Sol is the Martian day, not a martian solar year. Cold snaps and dust storms are measured in sols and hours, not sols and days. There are clear day/night cycles. The only way the people's life spans make any sense is to measure Sols differently for people than for drones, even though nothing in the game says so. So my initial disappointment still stands. People age way too fast.

[Ericus1]

No, a Martian Sol is a hybridized unit of time, so that we can have both a day/night cycle AND a somewhat realistic passage of time. It simultaneously represents a Martian 'day', which is about the same as an Earth day for the purposes of representing day/night, AND represents a Martian year, which is a little less than 2 Earth years, for the purposes of representing things like building construction, rocket travel times, colonist life span, crops/animals growing, etc. Each Martian 'day' is basically intended to be a stand-in for the average of all the days for that Martian year.

Do you really think rockets are travelling back and forth between Earth in 2 days? That we are terraforming an entire planet in less than a year? That cows grow up in from calf to cow in a week and a half? That people literally are dying at the age of two months? C'mon, use your brain. And yes, the disasters take place over Sols, but again, the time is more representative. What would you prefer, a game that has a day as the fundamental unit of time that took hundreds of days to do anything, a game that had a year as a fundamental unit of time that lost all the mechanics revolving around day/night, or the system we have now. It was a good comprise to be able to represent both, but I get that initially it's somewhat counter-intuitive for a new player.

Conceptually, the average Martian will live to be between 100-140 years old, before any tech effects.

[SkiRich]

A sol is both a day and a year.
Weird concept I known.
The devs explained it in one of their realy early twich sessions.
For the purposes of anything tied to days, sols act like days.
For the purposes of anything that act as years they are years.

Adjust your thoughts around that when playing and it should become second nature after a bit.

[IcicleFerret]

Still curious if there's a way to change the aging factor. Is there a mod or a command line I could edit?

[Wantoomany]

Originally posted by IcicleFerret:

Still curious if there's a way to change the aging factor. Is there a mod or a command line I could edit?

So, you're just going to ignore everything the folks above have already said and focus strictly on age? Why just that? Seems a bit cheap to have super longevity while still benefiting from insanely quick rocket trips, construction, and research times. If you want people to age slowly then EVERYTHING else in the game should slow down by a factor of 300% as well.

It should take you thousands of days for new born colonists to be part of the labor force and hundreds of days for buildings to be built or ships from earth to arrive. But Id expect that would be a very dull game.

[ElPrezCBF]

Cut the op some slack guys. If the Martian sol is already hybridized, then how much different is the OP's request from your own expectations? The only thing subjective I see here is how each player perceives time should pass for different aspects of the game, within reasonable practicality.

@op, you need to learn how to manage aging. If you provide a decent comfort level for your colonists and have a university running, the rate of births and graduations into the workforce should alleviate the loss of seniors. You can also bring in more specialists from earth though Martianborns are preferred because they can't get earthsick.