Maybe my villagers stay too healthy - and no, I'm not about to feed them the "make sick" stew this century

lol. I don't feed them the stew either. But when an event makes people sick, I use my children to heal most of them.

Sometimes I use children, sometimes I have a preferred villager who is the healer. But I usually don't worry about whether I have a Master Doctor or not, I find that they will often train themselves when the game is shut off or if I'm in another game slot.

I have seen villagers go to study herbs & flowers on their own, but only if they are a young teenager or if the food supply is less than 300. But even then, they sometimes get stuck by the dam.

BTW, in a new game I recently started, I didn't complete the herb puzzle. But I also have only need to cure one villager! I don't know if there is a relationship or not, but I don't really mind not having doctors if my villagers aren't getting sick! (The game has been running for a while, I have L2 explore, farming, engineering and science, completed the shell collection, two each butterflies and pebbles and six beetles still needed.)

My sick stew is very tasty.
It must be. I've cured 11,000 villagers.
lol

lol, Willie Wonka !! I am still hung up on this Master Doctor thing. I've had three villages running on VV1 since September, so when I saw the villagers initially going from plant to plant to plant to study them, I was really excited. But that soon led to disappointment, as villager after villager abandoned their medical studies, in favor of floating in the pond. Is there any thread on here where LDW explains why they created a village where there is a hospital, but no villagers interested in becoming Master Doctors?

Zippie,

I don't know what the problem is. I've had many Master doctors and very few of them have been ones that I've engineered. Get someone started on doctoring at a young age (as young as 2 works) by placing them on someone needing healing a few times until it works. Have them heal 3 or 4 people and they'll become an apprentice doctor and then continue to doctor when they're old enough without any prompting from you. Of course when there's an epidemic of some sort you can assist by popping them on people needing healing. Wah lah, you've got a Master doctor after a while.

Tess

Thanks, Tess. My real question though is why are the little villagers programmed to stop studying the strange plants once they reach adept. I have gone back through a lot of the threads here and so many people are complaining about master doctors, and I have seen no comment from anyone at Last Day of Work as to why these little villagers stop studying the plants. It was not like that in the first Virtual Villagers. This is a cute game, but overall, I am disappointed, and will not be keeping a village going with this game, as I have for nine months now with the first game. But thanks for the help.

While I agree with you that it'll be nice if the villagers continued to study the plants, it is not necessary to keep a village running. I have several mature villages, andMaster Doctors in many of them.

Just like you need to train new villagers to be a parent when the older ones turn elderly or die, new doctors need to be "started." I'll either pick kids to do all the healing when I have an health issue, ir find one who likes "medicine." When the game is turned off, or switched to another game slot, those villagers will increase their skills and will often start healing villagers on their own.

Using a child, after 3 batches of 'Sick Stew'.

After one batch of my famous stew.