Live a whole life, one year at a time

The mortality curve is calibrated against each country's own life expectancy and infant mortality figures, so the year you die is a draw from the country's real risk curve rather than a number pulled from a hat. Across the 217 countries the model reproduces national life expectancy to within a fraction of a year.

Your decisions are not a menu of stat changes. Leaving school at fifteen does not subtract a point from a score — it removes options from the rest of your life, and two years later it puts a specific job in front of you that someone who stayed in school would never be offered. Consequences land years after the choice that caused them.

Household background sets your starting position: income tier, family structure, whether you live in a village or the capital, and how much schooling your parents finished. That starting position is not a difficulty setting — it is the same set of circumstances that shape real lives, and the simulation only applies differences it can point to a published statistic for.