Life often starts with a childhood story, from a jar of coins on the kitchen table to a fence crossed at night. School now requires more engagement, there's a graveyard to keep, and the beach has treasure under it. Here's everything that changed.
Lives start with a story, some of them sad, some happy, but how it turns out is entirely up to you.
Grow up poor with a jar on the kitchen table, beside a mum with depression, with a loan shark at the door or a dad in prison. Look after a sick parent, live through a divorce, or find out the will was a bill. Move abroad, grow up in care, or sleep rough with parents who have no papers.
Not every childhood is hard.
Even if life is hard, there is sometimes a way to get out and improve your situation.
If you'd rather not play hard starts, switch Hard starts off in Settings.
In The Border, the night your family crosses the fence is played in 3D. Keep everyone out of the searchlight and the torches, and keep them quiet. A parent can draw the light away so you get across on your own.
At eighteen your childhood is added up: the strength it gave you and the scar it left, each with what it does for the rest of your life. Grow up in care and you know how to start from nothing, so a year on the street hurts half as much.
When a life ends, you can reminisce about the life choices you've made.
Family who have died stay on your Relations page, greyed out under Remembered. Once a year you can reminisce about each of them.
The study board and its cards are gone. School, university, work and your evenings are places to learn now. Every skill has a theory and a practice track, and you climb them by pressing explain, try and correct. Each press takes time.
Follow the class spends whatever school time is left and sits the exams. School time you don't use is gone when the year turns.
At six and at eleven your parents choose your school. Every school has its own timetable: a public school with no kit teaches three subjects, a private one with a lab teaches six. You can ask them to move you, and promising them a B helps.
Pick the job you want and the Transcript draws the road to it: what you need now, each school at the age it opens, and the earliest you could start.
A new special career. Clear the forest, lay graves by hand and keep them clean, and every grave pays you each year. A better grave pays more.
A grave left dirty angers the dead, so they may rise. The dead break the graves around them, then come for you. At night you'll want a flashlight.
Put them down and they drop loot. A friendly zombie at the old tomb forges it into better tools.
The career's screen is a plan of your yard: what it took this year, how clean the graves are kept, and the next stone you can unlock.
A Delivery Driver can hire drivers now. Take the Fleet Management Course and lease a truck for each one. At first the driver will not generate profit, but after you level up, this will quickly change.
At eighteen everyone is called to the army's board, once. Pass the medical and the run and the Soldier career opens.
The club you went to as a child points you at its career too, once you're old enough: the football club at Football Player, karting at Delivery Driver.
Walk an endless beach with a metal detector. The beep quickens as you get close, and a new shovel comes every four hours.
Dig up coins, jewellery, car keys, a wedding ring to give back or sell, or the pieces of a map that leads to a chest. Your shovels are kept on your account, so sign in to keep digging.
Sweep the detector over too many people and the crowd comes after you. Hit back and somebody calls the police.
From 28 October to 3 November the dead join the chase. Send all twenty back and you get the Halloween medal and two costumes.
Swim out past the buoys and you wash up in another country with nothing. Without papers, odd jobs pay less, no job on the Ladder will take you and no school will enrol you, until the country makes you a citizen.
An electric hypercar with jets. Lift it off the mountain road, boost, brake in the air and spin it. One tank of air holds you up for about twenty seconds and refills while you drive.
A hard landing costs you money. Land on the roof and the drive is over.
Every account gets one dose for signing in, and the serum isn't sold anymore.
There are 21 skills now. Counting and logic became maths, basketball and handball became sport, and cooking is a skill of its own. Your old skills carry over.
A job behind a degree or a trade asks for more than it did, and its main skill has to reach the level that schooling gets you to. The rest you learn on the job below it.
A skill your school doesn't teach can be learnt in the evenings with a tutor, a coach, a course online or on your own.
When a lesson costs more than you have, ask your parents. A yes covers every lesson you're short for, for the rest of that year.
The broken toy, the art homework and the after-school clubs are told the way your childhood would tell them. A family with nothing can't pay for lessons or give you pocket money.
Once HR is open it stays open and hires for whatever each line is short of at the end of the year. The bars show who it's going to hire.
What's next and the bug report sit on the corners of the bottom bar on every page. What's next also shows quick actions, training, free time and your look now.
OpenLifeSim is a free life simulator you play in your browser. A life you started before 1.6 carries on where you left it, with its skills moved onto the new list. The game has moved on since: see what's new in 1.6.6.
▶ PlayEarlier: 1.5 Leon · 1.4 Louis · 1.3 Chiron
