My tribe is slowly starving to death
i only have 19000 tech pts and need second fraction to get sharks.
i have the trees and my chief helps once a day. is there a way to make trees grow faster or a magic formula to make them think they ate. any ideas. thanks. any quick ways to get more tech pts.
i have 16 villagers one child.

This sticky thread has a lot of helpful advice for that situation.

Take care on which speed you are. In fast speed, they work fast but also they eat fast! Never quit your game letting it in fast speed but rather in slow speed. If you're very short in food the best is to put it in Pause until the tomorrow, then the chief will create food!!

Also, seventeen villagers is a far larger population than your food can support long enough to get the second faction, unfortunately; every hour will leave you with, on average, a deficit of nearly 400 food, and the three trees, plus the hive, only provide you with 3500.

I suggest pausing when you're away, and mushroom-hunting like a madwoman when you're there. If you've got the master farmers, rain-dance; more mushrooms appear in the rain. You will make extremely slow progress this way, but your food will shoot up in relatively few Isola years.

Whenever I start a new tribe. I always seem to get a barrel of kids that eat all my food!! I pause the game until my chief can give food. Otherwise all the villagers do is "Worry about Food"

I can't find the 'pause' option. Where do I look for it?

The easiest way is just to press the space bar, although you can go to the Menu screen, then Options to set any game speed, including pause. If you use the latter method, I recommend that you quit the game or click Done, then Play to prevent any problems that can be caused by leaving the game on the Options or Menu screens.

I had the same problem but was able to get my tribe through so good luck to you! I paused when I was away and hunted mushrooms constantly. I didn't do this because I didn't know about it until recently but you can drop three kids on mushrooms and collectibles by pausing then drop the first kid, unpause and quickly drop 2nd kid, pause again and then repeat with a 3rd kid. If you're fast enough, maybe you could do 4.

I couldn't deal with all my villagers worried about food on my last village(and I was attached to them), so I decided to pause the village for a few days, checking in every morning to unpause, have the chief make food, and then pause again. I did this until I had enough food to last them the amount of time to make the points they needed. With 5 researchers, they were doing 3500 points per hour approx. on fast speed, so with 16, that would be about 10,000 per hour, so you could get the sharks gone in about 3 hours or so... just get enough food to keep them happily working that long. Maybe over a thousand? If you have the patience...

Yes, I also did this with my 2nd tribe when I realized that the first tribe was starving and needed hand-holding to hunt for mushrooms. I left the 2nd tribe on pause for a couple weeks and built up a nice supply of food with the Chief's help once a day.