Health is health. When it drops below zero, they die.

Sickness is a condition that continually lowers health, until healed by a doctor. This has nothing to do with high or low levels of health. Low health without being sick is just called "Weakened."

From earlier posts in this thread, that appears not to be the case. Players have tried to kill off the slackers with evil potions. The health bar drops into the ball at the left end, but no one dies.

That being said, LadyC says she has seen deaths from repeated research accidents. I'd rather not see that for myself, thank you.


Exactly. Thank you for confirming what I said earlier.

As I said, dropping below zero kills them. Dropping to (apparently) zero, but not below it, does not kill them. Outside of that not-particularly significant detail, health does exactly what you expect health to do.

Note that there's no way to tell exactly how much health they have; the health bar, like the skill bar, changes in increments, and nobody who knows is saying exactly how that is tracked or rounded, though I could likely find the value with an external utility, if anybody really cared. I don't see that it would help me play the game, though, to know if an empty health bar is really a zero, or just 1 out of 100 health points, rounded down to the closest increment on the health bar.

It should be emphasised that a villager's strength as shown in the health bar has no direct relation to sickness. If a villager is left sick and is not healed the strength will decline and the villager may eventually die. Often the sick villager will wander off to the hospital area and be healed in a short time by a doctor without any appreciable difference to the health bar.

I had a "Potion Tester" in one of my tribes, Health can stay at Zero, villager will only be weakened. Any villager can become sick at anytime no matter the health level.

I had a lot of tribes die off b/c the game was still going on why I wasn't there and so the food supply would run out and wasn't able to replenish.

Pause the game when you will be logging off so that your people will survie longer. I haven't had any tribes die off since finding the pause button. Also use the Chief to replenish food so that if your food supply is empty, you people can still eat. Once your food supply reach 500, your people will stop worrying about food and stay to the task at hand. Hope this helps ^_^

Everyone does know that you can pause the game before you quit to insure nothing happens when you are gone from the computer, right? As far as feeding the tribe, I span around continuously looking for shrooms. I pick up two or three children and drop one child on the shroom after pausing the game. Then unpause and drop one or two more children on the shroom. This nets 18 food points each time. My children fed the tribe until other food sources became available.

I had a new game running. Had been playing about 10 days.
There was plenty of food the first tree was producing food but depleting, and the scientist was almost a master, the original farmer was an adept scientist as well as an adept farmer, a Child Chief and one other child. And a villager arriving by canoe. 9 villagers. Indeed I already had 3 Master Builders and had just cleared the leaves on the Roster of the Dead and the lab was set up and a few potions made.
And the other 2 trees were sprouting.
I paused every night and opened it get the Magic food and to collect some collectibles and played for about half an hour a day.
Mainly to allow my food resources to grow once the tree stopped producing and until I had got my lift repaired to complete the orchard. Which I had done but the original tree was almost clear.

The next day when I opened the game, on paused, I was greeted with a pile of bones in the auditorium, and no food in the container, and a message saying a disaster had befallen my villagers. All their food and their health had been lost and as a result they had all died. And it was still on pause. Definitely.

So if I had been playing would it have just happened "poof" just like that?
Or would I have been able to save some?
I have had messages before saying that the weather had caused food loss before or villagers becoming ill from the weather, but never a total wipeout.

(Well apart from when I first began I did, but I was not pausing the game. I soon learnt!)

It's strange! was it an event?
Normaly when you're in pause there is not event!

I know it was so weird.
I kept wondering if I had played a few more seconds I might have got some waring.