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.