I realize I'm light years behind the times, but I recently inherited a Palm TX from a friend, and am slowly discovering the fun that can be had with it, outdated as it may be!

Discovered VS a few days ago and am having a great time!
Since the last update was 4 years ago, I assume it's no longer being worked on, right?

And one big question: during my reading through this forum, I came across Village Sim Toolkit (save up to 5 games), but this seems to only work with VS version 1.0, and not v.1.1.
Same with the VS editor (which I'd love to have as back-up, since I'm a wimp when it comes to disasters striking in games. ).
Are there any other add-ons out there that can save games etc.

So far, I've only managed enough tech points to get to Harvest level 2, but it's slow going with the farm, since nobody has advanced to being a master farmer. Adept is the best anyone has achieved in any area so far.

Welcome! I'm glad you found Village Sim and our forums. Village Sim was a lot of fun to develop and paved the way for the entire Virtual Villagers series.

You are a good judge of game development practices, since you correctly assumed that we are no longer working on Village Sim (or any of our Palm or Pocket PC games, for that matter).

The two utilities that you found mention of were created by a fan of Village Sim, and they worked only with the initial version (1.0) of the game. We changed the savegame file structure in v1.1, which 'broke' those two utilities, and the creator of the utilities opted not to update them to work with v1.1.

There is a way to back up your game manually, however. Carla posted my procedures for managing Village Sim savegame files here.

Thanks for the welcome and the link to the saving procedure!

My villagers have managed to finish a new hut and have cleared the beach of debris in the meantime.
Now to get the tech points for fishing...

Thanks for this annoyingly fun game, keeping me away from other tasks! *g*

Well, my first game ended when the farm just wasn't producing anything, even after 4 years of planting and watering by all 5 villagers.
None were masters, though.
Does that influence the productivity of the farm?

Also, when they wander of from research, being curious about one thing or another, does this gain them tech points, or should all curiosity be discouraged and they should be dragged back to the research table?

That's too bad. I don't like it when that happens (although it most often happens to me when I get busy and forget all about them until it's too late).

The farm is programmed to produce crops roughly every 2 game years (the number of hours will depend upon game speed), and you should be able to support about a dozen villagers with just the farm and the berry bush. Depending upon how often you're checking the game, you may not see crops on the farm, though, since the farmers will harvest them while the game is off. You can check the game's stats screen to see how much food has been harvested since the last time you checked. That should help you determine if there's actually a problem.

The skill level of the farmers doesn't have any effect on the farm's crops (master farmers have another benefit that comes into play later in the game). If you're monitoring the game closely enough, you can move all of the farmers to the research table while the farm is empty to help get the tech points necessary for the final level of farming technology. Then just put them back on the farm when there are crops to harvest.

The villagers' curiosity is there to alert you to various areas of the island that are important. They don't produce skill or tech points, so you're safe in just dragging them back to work (like most of us do)!

I think one of the reasons was that I accidentally left the game on fast over night, and instead of farming, everyone decided they needed another hut more than food (even though nobody was checked into building at the time), because it was all built by morning, and almost all the food eaten.
There was still a little on the bush, keeping them going for another 4 years of game time, but despite everyone on farm duty, nothing ever grew.



Does this mean, once they've planted and watered a little, you can pull them off farming, until the crops actually show up?



Ah, good to know!
Now, I need someone to actually drag *me* back to work!

Ooooh... that could do it. Especially at the beginning of the game, you need to carefully assign your villagers to make sure that everyone is contributing to survival, both short-term and long-term. For example, if your only farmer gets sick, and you don't have a healer, they probably won't survive long without your intervention (especially on fast speed).

Yes, you can have your farmers doing other things when there are no crops to harvest. They won't gain as much farming skill that way, but they will help get to the next tech level. It's a trade-off, but it can be a useful strategy.

You should check out this post for some helpful tips on useful strategies. There aren't any spoilers in there, so it's safe to look at.

Started a new game, and am keeping a tight reign on it for now! *g*

This time the farm started producing right on schedule, and nobody is starving at this point (knock on wood that no disasters will strike, before they can scrape together enough tech points for fishing!).

It takes forever to become a master scientist!

Yeah... it really does take a long time!!

Yay, I now have two master scientists, but will probably have to give up one to breeding, since the other woman is just *not* getting with child, no matter how many times she takes her man indoors.