Hi,
I am using Treo 650 to play this game.
I noticed that when my PDA/phone is low on battery and I leave the game to run overnight my village dies of unknown causes... I wake up and check on my village and get the message that unknown fate has befallen my villages and they all died... This happened to me already twice. Once it happened I started a new game but when I opened my new game again for some reason my older game (the one where villages died) restarted. I was happy to get my old village back all intact and bypass the 'unnatural death' but it made me wonder if there is some kind of a bug or if there is really an event where all villagers die.. The second time it happened I was frustrated.. My village was doing quite well and in the morning they were all dead and there is no explanation whatsoever... Is this a programmed event I should watch out for or is this something having to do with my device crashing/running out of battery?

If this is something that's programmed then how do I avoid this end of the game? Can I install some kind of an editor that allows me to save the game before I go to bed? I play for several days and end up losing all my data when this frustrating event happens.
Thanks for your help,

As with all applications on any platform, you should save your game periodically to prevent the loss of the progress you've made in your game. Crashes and other bad things happen on any computer, and the Treo (being a phone) introduces an extra level of complexity to handheld devices. Standard practice for Palm OS applications is to save the application data when you exit the application, either to the launcher or to another application. I do that regularly with Village Sim, usually by returning to the launcher.

Some of the things you described are due to the fact that you left the game running for long periods without saving it. If you start a new game and run it continuously, if you have an "event" that aborts Village Sim, the next time you launch the game your old game will be loaded and will be treated as if you hadn't checked on the game since the last save.

There are no programmed events in Village Sim that cause all of your villagers to die. You didn't give a lot of detail on how far you'd progressed in the game, how many villagers you had or what their food supplies were, so I'll give you some general help.

Depending on what game speed was selected when you left your game overnight, what the available food supply was, how much you had expanded your population, and whether or not you had any trained doctors, it's conceivable that illness or starvation occurred. The safest thing to do is to set your game to slow speed overnight (I know many people who pause it, although that shouldn't be necessary).

The early part of the game should be focused on establishing adequate food supplies and researching additional harvesting technologies. If you breed too many villagers too soon, or divert your villagers' efforts away from survival (like trying to complete the puzzles too soon), you will have trouble keeping them alive.

Hey, thanks.

It's nice to know there are no programmable events to kill all your villagers.
I have successfully finished a medium level game before except the puzzle 12... with over 30,000 in food 65 villages, golden child etc. I then decided to start a new one to solve puzzle 12 at earlier stage..
I thought I was doing pretty good given my previous experience in terms of leaving villages overnight with certain ratio of farmers/children/nursing women/food supply.

These are my statistics before the game crash:

the first time it crashed I had around over 4000 food and maybe about 20 something villages.
The second time I had 30 villages (5 babies) and plenty of farmers (more than half population) and about 1500 food. I also already researched fishing. There was no reason for villagers to die in both cases. I suspect this may have something to do with the fact that Treo is a phone and it does crash quite a few times and also tries to reconnect to the network when it loses connection. The system time is set based on the network time and not based on internal system time, maybe this has something to do with that. In any way I need to know how I can save the game. Is there any way for me to return to my successfull village that crushed last night?

I heard there is an editor that allows up to 5 versions of game to be saved.

I also would like to find out if there is any reward/enlightnment at the end of the game when you solve all 12 puzzles. Because I was so far along in my first game and solved all the puzzles except 12 I am wondering if there is anything new that would happen after I solve all of them. Would I find out at the end of the game what happened to the village in the past or is this just the game with no end? I dont' want to know exactly what happens at the end, I just want to know if anything happens at all different when I solve all 12 puzzles.

Thanks

The tricky thing about determining what happened to your villagers is determining whether or not your game terminated without saving at some point. You may have had a very stable village going, but if you had been running it for days without saving and something happened to terminate it (an example would be a deliberate or unintentional soft reset, although there are many other possibilities), the next time you launched the game it would be as if you had ignored your game since whenever it was last saved (which could have been long before you had managed to get things working smoothly). For example, if you never saved it after you discovered farming and/or fishing, then had a crash, the next time you launched it, your villagers would likely be dead from starvation because the game would update based on having only foraging as a food supply. That would be disastrous.

It's possible to retrieve your game, but it depends upon how long it's been since you saved the game and when you last HotSynced. The most recent savegame at the time of your last HotSync is stored on your PC. The savegame file (VillageSavegame.pdb) will be stored in the 'backup' folder for Palm desktop (usually \program files\palm (or palmone)\user_name\backup). Sometimes there is also a savegame file in the archive folder. If you want to try restoring a savegame file from your PC, go to the folder where your savegame file is stored and double-click it. That will put it into QuickInstall, ready to be HotSynced back onto your Palm. Perform another HotSync and VOILA! You're ready to start right up from where you left off, with one HUGE caution: since your game was probably not paused when you HotSynced the savegame file to your PC, unless you can set the date and time in your Treo to match the date and time that the savegame file was created, you could have a disaster when you launch it if there's much of a time difference.

There is a toolkit/editor that a user of Village Sim has created. It is not authorized or supported by LDW, and you assume any risk associated with using it. You can see the author's post here.

There is no special "ending" to Village Sim after you complete all of the puzzles, since all of LDW's games are designed to be open-ended and allow you to play any given game as long as you care to. The Island Events will continue to happen, which can change the way things are going for your villagers. I know of some people who have kept their villages going for a very long time.

Thanks a lot!

You were surely right about that backup. I restored my 1st successfull village that had maxed out population and golden child. Lots of villagers died because of the time change since last backup but there is plenty of food left to make some more. I'll wait for the events to train that master builder, since village is pretty self sufficient now.

I'm very happy to hear that you were able to get going again with your old village! Have fun building that population back up!