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.