I never get past level 1. My food always runs out before I can get enough tech points. I've tried babies, and no babies but the result is the same. I'm getting bored now. Help!

One successful strategy for getting your village going is to put two villagers to work foraging for food and the rest of the villagers working at the research table. If you make sure that each villager has the appropriate Preferred Skill checked, they should stay more focused on the task, and you should be able to purchase Harvesting L2 before your village runs out of food. If the berry bush does happen to run out before you can purchase Level 2 of Harvesting, you can temporarily assign your farmers to do research to help with the points, then put them back to farming once you have crops. You should also hold off on growing your population until you get farming, because the kids eat as much as the adults. If you start the game on easy, you'll get 6 villagers (and that will give you an extra person to do research)!

I've never had villagers starve using that strategy.

Thanx. Will try that.

I had crops growing for a while and now they won't reappear. I have level 2 on everything now and my population has dwindled from 11 down to 6. Nobody has died from starvation exactly, but I think they did die from malnutrition. (living on foraged food, not crops) I've never had this problem before, at least for as long as I've had it now. Has anyone ever heard of this?

How long has it been since you last had crops? There have been rare reports of crops failures, even in v1.1 of Village Sim. Some testing that I did suggests that leaving the game paused for extended periods at a time (more than 12 hours) may cause the farm to get "stuck." The specific scenario that I tested was to simulate playing the game only during working hours and leaving the game paused for roughly 15 hours a day. In one of my games, I paused it the first time when the farm was empty, and it remained empty for several "real" days before producing crops again. In the other game, I paused it when the farm was producing crops, and they have never failed.

There is a possibility that if you pause your game for several days (even with an empty farm), the farm will begin producing crops again. I haven't finished testing this phenomenon, but my initial testing suggests that, if you pause the game for more than a few hours at a time, you should try to pause it when there are crops on the farm, if at all possible.