I have had this happen in several villages:

Even though I have Level 3 Farming and the algae problem has cleared up and I have sustainable fishing - sometimes the food runs VERY low and they are 'worried about food" - even though I have plenty of villagers fishing and farming.

I usually keep my population between 60-65 with alot of them fishing and farming - sometimes the food is well over 14,000 and right now it is only on 400 - very weird considering they are constantly fishing, some are watering crops but not all.

The game speed is on 2x during the day and 1/2 speed overnight - does anybody have any idea why the food supply goes low - and no, I have not had an island event or gong event related to this.

Thanks.

Sharon

Sharon,
I don't know why this happens, but I've been plagued by this too. In my most recent village, I solved the algae puzzle and then all four of my farmers (which is a hefty portion of my population) continued to water the crops instead of fishing in the ocean. It was so frustrating because the food level was below 200 and the scientists would leave the table to go worry about food.

The only solution I have found is micro-managing and forcing the farmers to fish rather than water crops. After a little while doing this, I close the program and leave it four a couple of hours (on 2x speed). When I return, the food level has risen to over 1000.

Good luck!

The only way to know for sure is to examine the game log, which will reveal what the farmers are actually doing.

my food will get up in the millons (3 million currently) and then an event will wipe it out.

I was lucky in VV1 this happened and for some reason no one went to collect more food, 90% of my villagers starved and I was left with 1 female.

Sharon -

Okay, so the "event" possibility has been thoroughly discussed. There is a _bug_ which causes farmers to make lousy judgment calls. They will farm empty soil when they should be fishing, and they just loooove those coconuts.

However, I *think* that even with a high (max, even?) population this _bug_ is not severe enough to cause mass starvation. As LadyCFII suggested, you can take a look at the game log.

If you haven't already done so, take a look at LadyCFII's very helpful post on backing up savegame files. Then, if you awaken to an empty village, you can always restore to a happier time.

Good luck!

In technical terms, sometimes villagers are just stupid. Sometimes they will "worry" about whatever instead of doing something about it. Sometimes they will forget to breed until it is too late for them to do so and they all die out. That's where being the Guiding Hand comes in.

On the other hand, sometimes they will get busy with projects and turn themselves into Masters with little or no help from you at all.

Tess

I find that once I have a large population and I put one in three villagers on farming there is no problem with food production. Try raisng your population to the maximum and play with a percentage of farmers that you find works best.

I think even 1:4 is a good percentage, expecially if one of those is a Master and will occasionally find a crab in the ocean.