You misunderstood me. I have 31 villagers and I've got as many as possible working on the new hut. It's that 16 of them are young and the gender balance is waaaaaaaaay off - the initial crew of 6 was 3 and 3 if I remember correctly? with one little one or something. And don't forget if there's not enough food they say "this villager is too hungry to think about that" or something similar.

And now I see what happened - you were replying to Emerald but it got posted as a reply to moi. Oops!

From experience, those forty-something villagers can keep breeding until they are sixty something. Weird but true! I've got a similar dilemna as my baby boom of 16 only yielded 4 girls. At least they'll all have a date for the prom...roflmao.

Dar

Your villagers can breed until they die -- the only drawback is that if your nursing mom passes away, the baby/ies will go away (they don't get buried, but they don't grow up, either )

And gender is random, as far as I know, so the more you breed, the more likely that you'll get the girls you need.

Thanks for the finger-crossing, need all the luck we can get. ;-) lol

My 6 youngest now are all girls, so things are sorting themselves out after all. I was pleased and surprised when I went back to my game that one of my girls had turned 18 and gotten pregnant without any encouragement from me! I had checked "breeding" on all my females so I guess maybe that helped.

Dar

I have a third question. Do you have to have a master doctor to study the plants or can anyone master them?

I've completed that puzzle at the very beginning of the game with villagers who had little, if any, skill.

Anyone can master them -- I usually do this very early in the game, before most of the villagers have much more than trainee skill in anything.

How do you know when they have mastered it?

It shows in the status bars at the bottom of the screen when you click on the villager (untrained, Trainee, Adept, Master)