The six stats, explained

Every life in Life Like is tracked by six numbers: Looks, Smarts, Health, Wealth, Happiness, and Social. You never edit them directly. They're set at birth by your era, your birthplace, your family, and the gift you pick — and then every choice you make pushes them up or down until the life ends. Understanding what each one actually does is the difference between guessing at choices and reading them.

Health is the one that ends runs

Health is different from the other five, because it doesn't just score — it decides whether you finish the life at all. Each era has a baseline life expectancy, and your Health modifies it. That baseline is brutal in the early eras: 45 years in Antiquity, 42 in the Middle Ages, 52 in the Industrial Age. Take a run of health-damaging choices in a medieval life and you won't reach the events that would have made it a good story — the life simply stops.

This is why Health is worth protecting early even when a choice offers something shinier. A dead run scores whatever it had at the moment it ended. A long run keeps accumulating.

Wealth swings the hardest at birth

Wealth is the stat most determined before you make a single choice, because your family sets its starting point directly. Born with nothing at all starts you around 6. A poor household is about 20, working class 38, comfortable middle class 58, an affluent family 78, and an old-money dynasty starts at roughly 94 out of 100.

That's an enormous spread, and it's the clearest example of the game's central idea — you didn't choose it. A dynasty start hands you most of one stat for free. What it doesn't hand you is a good life: that same dynasty background carries a happiness penalty and a social one, because a surname that opens doors closes hearts. High Wealth with low Happiness is its own kind of ending.

Happiness is the quiet scorer

Happiness rarely announces itself. No single event doubles it, and it doesn't gate anything the way Health does. But it runs underneath the whole life, and it's what separates two runs that look identical on paper. A life that accumulates money and status while bleeding Happiness lands somewhere very different from one that traded some wealth for contentment.

Era matters here more than players expect. The present day carries a happiness penalty — wifi, anxiety, and infinite scrolling — while the cassette age carries a bonus. Two otherwise identical lives, born forty years apart, don't start level.

Smarts compounds

Smarts tends to open choices rather than resolve them. It's boosted by the more developed eras (the present day, the near future, and especially the far future, which adds a large bonus) and by an affluent or middle-class upbringing with its tutors and quiet expectations. It's penalised in the pre-industrial eras.

Because it accrues from your starting conditions and then keeps mattering across a long life, Smarts rewards the runs that survive. It's a poor stat to chase in a short, dangerous life and a strong one in a long, stable one.

Social is the most place-dependent

Where you're born moves Social more than anything else. A small village gives a solid bonus — everyone knows your business by lunch, and that cuts both ways but connects you. A roaring megacity penalises it: ten million strangers and nowhere quiet. A remote mountain region and an off-world colony both isolate you further.

Social is also where the poorer family backgrounds quietly win. Being born with nothing at all carries a Social bonus, and a poor household does too. Love was the only thing not rationed. It's one of the ways a low-Wealth start isn't simply a worse start.

Looks is the most volatile

Looks does the least work at birth — only an affluent or dynasty background nudges it meaningfully — but it's the stat most likely to be swung by a single born gift. Picking Striking adds a large chunk of it immediately. Doors open for a face like yours, and certain events respond to that.

How they combine

At the end of a life all six feed a score, which maps to a letter grade — S for a life for the ages down through F when the cards were stacked. Crucially, the game also reads the shape of your stats, not just their total. Dying rich but miserable is a specific recognised outcome, not just a middling score. That's why chasing one stat to the exclusion of the rest tends to produce a memorable life rather than a high-scoring one.

For the full breakdown of thresholds, see how lives are scored, graded, and titled. For where your starting numbers come from, read your starting hand and the era guide.