I would have submitted this through the support section on the virtual villagers website here, but whenever I submitted the form, it timed out. [[Resolved. ~Xay]]

I'm on an iphone 6 with iOS version 10.2. (As an aside, only iOS versions 3 and 4 were available on the support form for some reason. You might want to fix that.) I bought the full version of Virtual Villagers: The Secret City directly from the app store. I have previously bought the full version of the second virtual villagers game and completed it on this phone without issues.

The issue is regarding what I'm fairly certain are the keys to the door at the top-left of the village. When you start a new game, there is a pink object at the top of a cliff at the top-right of the village, and there's a black pearl in the mouth of a clam out on the coral reef. However, when you close the game and come back later, they're gone. If you start over with a new tribe, they re-appear again until you've closed out the app again.

Upon confirming that closing the app is what causes the bug (at first I thought it was closing the app while paused that causes the bug, but the bug occurs regardless of game speed when you close the app), I downloaded the lite version to see if it has the same problem. It does.

Please fix this. It's extremely frustrating. I updated my iphone to the version mentioned at the beginning of this post (10.2) in hopes that it would fix the bug, but it didn't. Expecting users to keep the app open in the background at all times is unreasonable (e.g. what if the phone's battery runs out of power, or I need to turn it off, etc.) and a hassle, and even if I tried, from past experience it seems like the iphone unloads out-of-use background apps if you're doing a lot of stuff in the foreground, which would likely render the effort moot.

I'd really like to be able to play this game all the way through without issue. Virtual Villagers: The Lost Children was a lot of fun, and this one looks like it could be even more fun if it worked properly.

You may try this one;
https://ldw.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Ah. How was I supposed to find this site?

In any case, I've used it now that you've linked me. Thank you.

I agree that it wasn't effortless to reach support url. Firstly i went to Lastdayofwork.com
Secondly, i found "Help" at very below of the page (It was too small, uggh ) and lastly i found request url at upper right corner of the page. BTW YW.

The big "Help" in the top orange banner leads to the same place, but now the "Help" in the red virtualvillagers.com banner leads to the same location as well.