Hi Shirley- if you are open to mods, the first one I would suggest is MCCC (MC Control Center). This is a complicated mod in that is has MANY settings you can impact, but the blessing of it is that you don't have to change anything, so you can get to know all the many settings slowly. It does allow you to change the rate of needs decay to make it slower. If you do decide to use this and want some tips about settings, let me know and while I'm not an expert on the mod and there are many settings I haven't explored, I am happy to share with you the ones that I wouldn't want to play without. I will say that I played for years with no mods at all - I was mostly playing challenges that didn't allow any mods. But since I started using mods, I just really don't play without this one.
Another one I would suggest, at least early on, is UI Cheats Extension - this mod lets you change virtually anything right from the game interface - if your needs go down and you want them up, you can just click on the bar of that need and drag it to green. There's so much you can change. In my actual play, I don't use this one much because it's so easy to just cheat stuff and then you can lose a lot of what the game is about, but in the beginning, when you're still learning how to get your needs up and keep them up, and learning all kinds of other things about the game, it can be really handy to just be able to cheat it up and keep going with whatever you're wanting to do.
The big thing to remember about mods is that when the game is updated by EA, those updates can break the mod. Most mod creators (at the least the ones that produce the best and most-used mods) are pretty quick about updating their mods, but you do have to download the new version when that happens.
I'm not always on the forum every day, so I may not be really speedy with responses, but if you have any questions, I'm happy to help whenever I can.
