My villagers have been watering the crops for hours on fast speed and I have yet to see a crop grow! Any ideas/suggestions/hints?

Are any of your vills planting the crops?

If your food supply in the bin is good and you have about 20-25% of your villagers working on farming, I wouldn't worry too much about the fact that you don't see crops on the farm. The crops grow on a cycle, similar to a real farm. Depending on how often you're checking, you may just be 'missing' the crop cycle. The crops can be harvested fairly quickly if you have more than about 12 villagers. Once they are all harvested, there will be no more food from the farm until the next crops appear. By the time you get to 15, you really need fishing in order to grow your village and maintain an adequate food supply.

i have researched harvesting to level two but the farmers won't farm. I am completely out of food (no more berries) And I have a master farmer that just keeps watering but no crops grow. (yes he plants crops too) At this point I have everyone chipping in but still no luck. The food bin is still at zero. any suggestions?

You can see my answer to your other post here.

My food was zero when I posted earlier. The villagers were planting and watering for several hours (real time), but no crops ever grew and everyone eventually died.

I have since started a new game and knew to obtain Harvesting Level 2 more quickly and had plenty of food at that point. This time the crops grew right away.

I guess if the villagers have zero food their crops will not grow.

Which version of Village Sim are you running? If you haven't downloaded and installed the v1.1 update, you should really consider doing that before you get very far in your current game. It can be obtained from here: http://www.ldw.com/zips/vs1_1.zip and uses the same registration code you had for v1.0.

I must say I had a similar problem. I had Level 2 Harvesting, my first crops came in fine, within a reasonable amount of time.

However, when the farm expired, I had 12 of my 16 people watering/planting for *years* and the crops never came back. I am on a registered 1.1 version it was painful to watch all my children die!

I did a lot of testing on the farm during the development of v1.1, because the farm production had been quirky and was critical (of course) to the game. In my tests, it was only the crop graphic that failed to appear, and the villagers were, indeed, gathering food from the farm. The amount of food that was produced from the farm over the 36-hour test period was almost 10,000 units, but the only time that the crop graphics reliably appeared on the farm was when I checked on the game at least once or twice an hour. If you were to check the stats page of your game during play, I think you would see the Food Harvested statistic going up, despite the fact that you never see crops.

I think the more likely cause of starvation is that you grew your tribe too quickly. I never increase my population to the number of villagers that you had until my villagers know how to fish. The farm produces only a finite amount of food during each crop cycle, while fishing supplies unlimited food. That way, I have excess food stored up in my food bin and can quickly recover from any Island Event that disrupts my food supply.

Thanks for the post. This game, I am keeping my population to 10 until I get to fishing.

However, it definitely wasn't a graphic issue. I had a 16 population for a long time with the farm. Once the food graphics disppeared, I went to making a lot of food, to a big loss rate that never slowed down. Even more so, the fact that the 12 villagers never stopped getting water from the well (vs going to the food bin to deposit) was stranger.

I might do some more testing to see if there's a problem lurking in the farm when you have a higher population. My tests were all done with a lower population.

Is there any way to get around this crop bug in v1.0? I have played for more than a day and don't want to install v1.1 and wipe out my current game.

I never experienced a problem with crops the entire time I was testing and playing v1.0, so I can't say for sure what might get you around the problem. The reports of difficulties were rare. You might try to leave your game running on AC power to see if the farm straightens itself out and starts producing regularly again. I've found that in v1.0 the villagers are far more productive when the game is left running than when it's turned off.