So my brand new LifeDrive froze up installaing some new software, and my last Sync was about 36 hours old. After restoring all sorts, I finally the machine to boot again.

However, I've got a 36-hour old VillageSim file. When I last left my hopeless vilalge, I had about 18 villagers and maybe 1500 food. When I bring them up again now, I have only 5, with 13 corpses lying around. And 3000 food.

My villagers faithfully carry all the decomposing bodies to the graveyard. But I have no idea what they died of.

My youngest now is about 20, so I don't think they could have all died of old age. Some were pushing 60, but others were 30 and 40.

Any ideas?

Note: The only events that happened when I brought the system up again was the Whale event (that I rescued). And thankfully 3 of the 5 are female.

Although some undoubtedly died of old age, the most likely culprit was sickness. 36 hours is a long time to go without peeking in on your village! I'll give you a little tip for the next time something like that happens. After you get your LifeDrive all back the way you want it (don't you just LOVE how long it takes to reset?), take a look at the date/time of your latest savegame file. Set the LifeDrive's clock to match, use QuickInstall to load it onto the LifeDrive, bring up Village Sim, pause the game, and then set your LifeDrive's clock back to the correct time. Voila - no dead villagers! (This technique will work with any device, not just LifeDrives.)

I still have the backup file. Maybe I'll do that.

/bow

Update: I decided to leave it like it is. Its pretty funny to have 5 adults and 14 kids running arouhd the island. Let's hope I don't run out of food before the kids grow old enough to make themselves useful!

I have one villager decomposing in the village center. All the villagers just walk over him. No one seems to want to bother with burying the poor old soul. My graveyard has not yet been established. All my techs are at level 2 except Harvesting & Building which are at level 3. So how do I get my villagers to carry him off to the graveyard?

You need to take one of your adult villagers exploring and see if they can find an appropriate place to bury their dead.

Actually, sometimes when u dont check on your vills for a while, and even if they are not sick, there can still be some kind of epidemic and causes most of them to die even if the doctors hav healed sick vills already. So thats not really a big problem if u hav lots of food.

I found a way to figure out whether or not a villager died of sickness. All you do is drag a healer to the corpse and if he "improves at healing" this villager died of sickness. If not it was probably from old age or lack of food :

Very clever!