Hmmm, that is interesting....So no one is ageing huh? What game speed are you playing at?

I think it's 2x.. isn't that why the mom's have 120 minutes? I have a 12 year old that hasn't aged one year since I started the game. Very weird indeed.

One of the times I had to start over, all of my nursing mothers began thier countdown not at 120 minutes, but at 234. I tried turning on and off the game, in and out of pause mode, thinking the game might right itself. This only angered the village gods, so much so, that the nursing mothers continued their countdown not at 234, but at over 34,000 minutes.

Among other things, I too had a young villager who would not age, ever, and had a farmer with "running" under his likes who suddenly refused "all" work "all" the time because he was caught within a continuous "waiting for someone" loop.

I am on a brand new game this morning (yet again) because all of my villagers decided to name themselves the same name, even "after" I changed them back to the names I chose for them. Yep, I thought no big deal, until I became convinced that a running game with one glitch might cascade into others glitches.

I seriously love this game, but if I had a dollar for every glitch which caused me to start over, well, I'd at least have the money right now for virtual villagers II.

Um...okay, so I already have the money waiting (grins).

P.S...I just checked my game. Before writing that last post, I had five villagers at the research table, all of them adept scientists. Now, two of them jumped back down from adept scientists to untrained villagers, even though they retained the same amount of experience in research as the adept scientists have (when you look under "details"). That's another dollar, right? --lol--

I know that leaders of the village get pestered by the others frequently with social events, such as chatting, praising, or complaining. Perhaps your farmer was in a leadership position? It's hard to tell if you don't have the GC, but typically all the children of the village are "on the left" and the oldest members are "on the right" of the leader (look at the details screen, see the arrows at the bottom, and you'll understand what I'm talking about.)

There are several facets to the things that you're describing, only one of which is an actual _bug_ in the game (for some unknown reason, and it's rare to see it happen, the villagers' names can change). Zylador's description of the village elder is correct. The more villagers you have, the more your village elder will be interrupted, since he or she will be sought out more frequently as the population grows.

The nursing moms and the children's ages are a different phenomenon. There are a lot of complex timers in the game, and they are all affected by game speed and your computer's system clock. Under normal circumstances, the nursing timer is based on game speed. At 2x speed, it has a nursing time of 120 minutes. At normal game speed it's 240 minutes. The nursing timer displays a very large number when the game is paused, but will return to normal when you unpause the game.

Without more information, it would be difficult to say exactly what's causing your situation, however it sounds like something we see frequently when people try to make the game progress more quickly by adjusting their computer’s system clock. While that sort of “time travel” is a popular way to speed up game play, real-time games rely on the accuracy of the computer’s system clock to operate properly. Unpredictable results can occur if adjustments are made to the clock, especially moving the clock backwards in time. Different games will respond differently under those circumstances, ranging from minor statistics anomalies to killing whatever is living in the game. Virtual Villagers has a much more complex real-time engine than Fish Tycoon, and you're much more likely to see problems with it when adjusting the system clock.

While many people do adjust their system clocks to speed up play, doing so affects far more than just the games. Every application in your computer is affected, including the file system and Windows system applications. For all of those reasons, we don’t recommend changing your computer’s system clock to speed up game play.