I noticed this morning on one of my little families that I had forgotten to buy them food and they were all running around hungry but in good health. I went a head and bought the food so that I wouldn't forget tonight but since I was also trying to make baby 6, I paused the game (before letting them eat) so that mom didn't age anymore today as she is pushing the age limit.

This afternoon when I got home and unpaused all their status' had changed to Starving and one is "extremely weak" another "a bit weak". How did this happen if the game was paused?

Hi Keri! You should never leave your game when your family is hungry. You may have to initate the cooking of the meal by dropping one of the peeps on the breakfast bar. After they cook the meal they don't always sit down to eat by themselves either no matter how much you praise them for it, so you may have to pick them up one by one and put them down to eat. It gets boring, but it does keep your little peeps healthy. Big hugs!

Thanks. I don't normally leave them hungry but I didn't have time to make sure they cooked and fed themself this morning so figured pausing the game would work. Guess not.

I guess I don't understand why pausing the game wouldn't keep them from starving. Isn't that what "pause" means? Stopping the game where it is?

Are you sure that you paused the right game? The pause feature only works on the game slot you're in, not all the slots.

Plus, pause is actually just e x t r e m e l y slow.
It's possible that if your family members were on the verge of the starving mark, they might have moved into it while you were gone, and then that may have started moving the health bar down.

Yep, it was the correct slot. Since I was trying to get that last baby before mom aged too much more, I had been watching pretty close.

Thanks for clearing up that pause is just extremly slow, I though it would completely pause. I will keep that in mind!

You know...I am probably wrong but have given quite a bit of thought about how this game really runs and what I think happens is that even though it was paused (and they didn't actually get any hungrier while it was paused) as soon as you unpause the game, the game instantly "sets the time to your current time" and automatically figures in what would have happened if they had gone all those hours without food.

I wonder if maybe Arthur or Lady could give us some insight into why this happened in your game. But {{hugs}} to you because you must have felt awful. Just remember that you didn't mean for it to happen and tried to make sure they were going to be okay.

Yeah, I would have thought that pause would have kept that from happening to Hon.

I don't think it works that way if it works the same as the VV series. I left one of my villages paused for 3 months last summer because I was gone and my favorite little villager had not aged and their food level was the same. If it figured to the new time, the village would have been wiped out.

Oh, yea -- you're right. I remember leaving one of my villages paused for close to a week and they were all fine. Well, I don't know what happened. I still wish that maybe one of the game developers could explain it to us though.

OK, I really think this is gonna be a problem. Cause,if I go away for say a week, I don't want to come back to a sad situation. Pause should mean pause, and when you start playing again it starts from there. Can we get one of the VV administrators to have this fixed or at the very least let us know what their definition of pause is, please?

I've been pausing a lot, since my gaming habbits are quite irregular and I don't want to miss their important moments. Though I never wrote down the actual details and checked them later, I'm pretty sure that such irregularities never occured in my game. I find the food levels, energy and health bars unchanged (or not noticably changed) when I unpause the game. But once, a nursing mother let her kid go right after I unpaused, and once I unpaused the game, clicked on a peep and his status changed to hungry from elated right in front of my eyes (but he hadn't have a meal for some time already). I just assumed that these things were about to happen anyway, so I didn't care that much.

But I remember that in VV, some things were kind of triggered by exiting and reopening the game, such as nursing moms letting their kids go. If I remember right there was a three minutes' check time about that, and reopening forced the game to do that check earlier. So I'm thinking, maybe, these things in VF are caused by similar reasons.

If you put the pause on in the

If you put the game in pause in the options shouldn't that pause ALL games?

I'm really interested in this, too. I live in one place from Monday afternoon to Thursday afternoon, and in another the rest of the time. I really hope that if I pause the game, it really IS paused!!

If it's NOT paused, just very slow, how much food should I have to insure that they don't starve while I'm away??

I would just make sure and feed them before you pause...make sure they are well fed...then pause each family slot after they eat by hitting the spacebar. It's quick and easy and helps you make sure that slot is paused. Since the game hotfixes the families don't consume much food at all while you're away so you don't need to worry about stocking up too much.

Good luck!

Pausing the game does stop everything in the game; however you have to keep a few things in mind about how pausing works in LDW games.

Leaving the game on the menu screen (or any other screen) does not pause the game, even though it seems like nothing is going on.

Going to the Options screen and pausing the game will completely pause the game, but only if you click Done on the Options dialog and quit the game.

If you intend to leave the game running, the safest and most reliable way to pause it is to press the space bar and verify that you see the message "GAME PAUSED" in the blue player comm area.

I always use the space bar to pause the game, since it doesn't matter if you leave it running or quit; it's paused.

I didn't mean to cause any problems!

But in case there is something going on, I will say I paused with the spacebar on that slot only and minimized it without returning to the menu of the game.

Perhaps it was just timing on my game. Since I have 4 other slots active it is very well possible that I checked the other 4 first and between that and pausing the one game slot their status and hunger leveled changed without me realizing it.

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback and well wishes! They were all fully fed and feeling much better by the time I went to bed!

Lady, thanks so much. I was so worried about my peeps when I saw this thread. I know I paused it from the options menu, so when I go back home today, I'm sure my peeps will be ok. They're the first family I started and I would hate for everyone to be dead from lack of food!

Be sure to check each of the peeps "hunger" level on the detail screen after they eat. Sometimes I just keep dropping them back on the kitchen table (same meal that was prepared - just never cleaned up) until they are completely "full".

I apologize for my misunderstanding of the concept, and am glad that it was explained correctly. I'm also glad to read that your family is better now.

I feed my family 3 times a day and have no trouble. They should eat like we do, I assume. At least my people do. Hope they don't get fat, lol.

I do too, and in between meals they help themselves to snacks. That would be the Ultimate Virtual Family!

I'm home and my peeps are fine!! I was so happy! I've got the most adorable set of twins and I was hoping that they'd be ok.

(Isn't it strange to worry about V children???)

at least once a day (usually twice) i have one cook a meal, and sit them all down to eat, as i noticed the cook will usually cook the meal then take off. i check their fed bars, and feed them until it is almost full. i haven't had any hunger issues. i also buy at least one of each food group every day.