What is the difference between the preferences... mostly the time ones. The degree of difficulty is pretty self explanatory, however, the higher the difficulty, does that mean more island events will happen to you?

When you put Time on Slow, Med, or Fast... what does that then do for your game exactly?
What are the advantages/disadvantages of each time speed?

Maybe Slow:Everything Moves at a slower pace And Reserach too... farming ETC. MED:normal Rate Fast:everything is very fast and moves Quickly it can be changed if somting is too fast and is hard to control you can slow it down or its too slow and gettin tedious you can increase the speed...

Game speed settings affect how quickly your villagers age, how quickly they produce things like food, construction projects, and research points, and how frequently Island Events occur. The advantage of slowing the speed down is that you don't have to check on your villagers as frequently to make adjustments in the game. The advantage of the faster speeds is that you don't have to wait as long for things to happen in the game - but you also have to check on them fairly frequently. The speed setting does not affect the movements of the villagers while the game is running - they don't mosey around the village on slow speed, nor do they run around the village on fast speed.

The difficulty settings determine how easily your villagers will be able to research and gather food. On the easy setting, you start out with 6 villagers and more food. On the hard setting you start out with 5 villagers and no food.