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Only The Good Die Young - Unsupported

This mod is no longer supported. As of game version 1.1 the bug that this mod addressed has been fixed and so this mod is no longer needed.

1.1 Patch notes state:
- Fixed an issue that led to most characters having a natural lifespan in excess of 90 years

And from my own testing I have found this to be correct. After a 100 in-game years there were only 5 characters over 80 and none over 90.

Furthermore they have made it so that a characters health influences how long a character will live. The patch notes don't make it clear but from the game files it shows that a character with a health of 0% will die between 50 and 80 whereas a character with 200% health will die between 70 and 100. I'm not entirely sure I like those figures but its better than what it was like before!

I'll leave this mod up in case anyone is still using it on older versions of the game but I have no plans to update it.


This mod creates an event with a low percentage chance to kill characters over 60 years old each month. Characters over the age of 90 will get a slightly higher chance to die each month. So you may still get some old characters but it will be extremely unlikely that your characters will get to the age of 100 or over.

Additionally, if a character of any age gets the Cancer trait, they will have a very high chance of dying.

This mod will also give you a more prominent notification of when your current ruler dies. Your King may not have much power after you've enacted universal suffrage but the death of a monarch/theocrat/dictator/president should not go unnoticed!

There is a known bug that characters too often live to be 100 or more. Paradox may some day get around to fixing it but until then, I created this mod.

The lifespan of a character seems to be mostly hard-coded but there are defines in the game files that suggest a death check is supposed to happen, by default these checks should start at age 60 and characters should definitely be dead by 100. But even when you change the value to a lower number there is still a strong skew to characters only dying at 100 or 101.

There are other mods that attempt to make characters die younger, such as "Rulers die early" - these work by lowering the value of DEATH_CHECKS_YEAR_BEGIN to make the death checks start sooner but in my experience this only has a minor effect. That's not due to the mod itself, but just the way the game works at the moment and how it uses that value.

As this mod uses its own events to kill characters it works more effectively at ensuring characters die at a wider range of ages.

When making this mod, I also tried to have the mod take into account the characters health. So, for example, a character with low health would have a higher chance of dying younger. However there doesn't seem to be a way to query a characters health using the jomini scripting language that the game uses. If anyone knows otherwise, please let me know!

This mod may not be compatible with any other mod that changes the on_character_death action effects. This is purely for the part of the mod that gives a notification on a rulers death. I'm not aware of any other mods that change this but I haven't checked thoroughly. However, I believe this mod will work with most other mods.

I tried to create localizations for all the game languages but I mostly used Google Translate so its probably bad. If you can give me a better translation then please get in touch!

I've run through several decades of game play to try and get the balance right on this mod, but you may find that characters seem to die younger towards the end of the game than they do at the start of the game. This is due to the fact that many characters are already way over 60 at the start of the game. However, I'm open to any feedback you can provide when using this mod if your characters seem to die too young.