Every time I go to bed, my villagers die?

[Simon Blackquill]

So here's the basic rundown:

I had 7 adult villagers and 3 children. All adults were fairly good health and high in skill.

They had a bush with at least 1,400 berries still, a crop field, a well, a lagoon, flower field and the beach cleared, as well as a school and an extra hut.

So I basically had them all working on research while I was gone, nothing more so they wouldn't overwork themselves. And they have 200 food in their little basket thing.

I set gamespeed to normal (because apparently my last game's mistake was leaving it at 2x speed), and assign a single villager to remain picking crops and so that they don't take too much food. (Because, again, in my first game, they somehow took all the berries within an hour.)

And I go to bed.

And, I wake up with everyone dead except one child.

Why the hell does this keep happening? What am I doing wrong?

It seems like they literally won't eat while I'm asleep. But, why?

[kilicool64]

Food is used up pretty quickly. You should always tell someone to prioritize farming or else your villagers won't bother harvesting enough food to survive. 200 food in particular is so little that your villagers will often worry about the food shortage instead of working. At such low food levels, I'd halt the game's progress altogether while absent and supervise the villagers for a while to make the children find some mushrooms and ensure the adults don't slack off from work until they've stored a decent amount of food.

The rest of the bunch should indeed focus primarily on research though. You'll need a lot of tech points in order to research fishing and get rid of the food shortage once and for all.

It might be useful to have one villager prioritize healing to automatically cure sick villagers in your absence, but even they should be manually told to do research while you're playing as soon as their healing skill is at an acceptable level.

As far as I remember, building projects aren't very helpful at all in the early game, so I'd ignore them.

Don't breed too many children either. Having one child at a time is perfectly sufficient for collecting mushrooms. Keep in mind that every new child will render one of your female villagers unable to work for two years and will increase your food consumption.

[Simon Blackquill]

So what is a 'decent amount' of food? Because I honestly thought 200 was since villagers only eat 1-2 food usually. 600 or so?

I guess I'll restart, build one hut, prioritize farming and research and see what happens.

[kilicool64]

Admittedly, I played the game in hard mode, so the situation might not be as extreme for you, but the problem with worrying about food should still be an issue there. IIRC, your villagers won't worry as long as the food basket doesn't look like it's nearly empty. I think it's 500 food, but I could be remembering this incorrectly. You'll be notified when you reach this point the first time.

[Simon Blackquill]

That's so weird, because one time a box of bananas washed up on shore and gave me 1,000 food, but I wasn't even notified. I guess the selection of opening the box is notification in it of itself but... sometimes this game is very confusing. xD

I'm just glad to play it again, it used to be my favorite game when I was a kid on Kabillion.com.

[numbkitten]

I leave mine at half speed

[Alyshae]

I pause for long periods. I only leave them running when I'm working on something else and can check in on them regularily. Otherwise I come back to a crisis