I finally got something going and I had like 3000 tech points then a monkey ruins my table and they take away my tech points. Now I am out of food and have all my villagers researching. I am afraid it is to late for them and they will all die. Then I have to start all over again? This is not a good game for impatient people is it? I mean if I had progress it would be cool but this is the 2nd time I will have to start over. Sorry, just had to gripe a bit...

Well, I made all of my people work on research all night and was able to go up a level on food. But now I have the flowers and the river open and my people are not making their crops anymore. I have almost everyone working on it and still no crops appearing anymore. Why is this? I have paused the game till I can find out more. I am not investing anymore time into this game if they all die again. LOL It is ruining my life. Just kidding.

Are you, by any chance, pausing the game for long periods of time? If so, please check this thread for something that might help you.

No, I have not paused the game, I have switched from fast speed to slow speed. When I play live I like to do fast and at night I make it slow. The crops going in cylces does help but I am at level 2 croppig and have never had 500 in my bin. I also have 15 villagers. I guess I need to breed more to get the 3rd hut but seems like all I have time to do is harvest and water and 2 people researching.
But I am still all alive and no one has died yet although I can not wait for that as I want to bury my first villager and reach one of my goals. Thanks for the reply.
ONE QUICK NOTE:
I did notice when you have a crop up some people are harvesting but if you put them back on the crop it then says planting. I do not think this affects the crops as I made for sure I always had at least one person harvesting and one planting and one watering and my crop still dissapeared.

15 villagers is probably about as many as the farm can comfortably support. If you make any more baby villagers before you get to Level 3 of Harvesting, you're almost certain to have significant issues with your food supply. 15 villagers can eat a lot of food! I never go above a population of about 12 until I have Level 3 of Harvesting.

well is there an easier way to get 50000 tech points. I am addicted to this thing and have been playing it most all day. But not very succesful on the tech points. Should I skip getting level 2 of Medicine and try for level three of harvesting first?

It does take some time to get enough points, but see this thread for my answer to a similar question.

thanks for the advise. I did get lucky and some guy came to my island asking for food, I said ok and he autimatically raised my medicine so I am already at level 2 on everything so now just focusing on getting enough tech points for level 3 harvesting. taking forever to get there.

well so much for that game. I had it on my palm and it was showing on both my hard drive and my card so I deleted it from my hard drive without my card in and it still erased all memory of my game on the card. So now I get to start all over. Not sure if I am up for that or not... I will keep you informed.

Sorry to hear that. Unfortunately, that phenomenon is a result of the way that Palm OS works (and most people are not aware of). Even though you can install applications on an expansion card, they can't actually be run from there, and must be in main memory to be executed. In normal operation, when you run an application that has been installed on an expansion card, Palm OS copies that application to main memory to actually run it. When you exit the game normally, the application is deleted from memory to free up the space (but the savegame file remains in main memory).

I spent some time testing after Village Sim was released, and I verified some interesting things about how applications that are installed to an expansion card are handled in various circumstances. If, while running the application, the device is reset (either intentionally or unintentionally), the application is left in main memory and behaves just like you had installed it there, rather than on the card. It stays in main memory and is not deleted when you exit the game. If you then use Palm's "Delete" function to remove the application from main memory, it will also delete that application's data (which, in the case of Village Sim, is the savegame file).

The only safe way to delete the "extra" copy of an application in that kind of situation is to use a file manager application, like FileZ. The good news, however, is that there is a way to get your savegame file back, depending upon when you last HotSynced your Palm. Let me know if you want the details.

well, for future reference, yes I would love the details. I did start another game though and since I knew some of tasks already it was a little easier to get started. So now I am back to square one with only 2nd on harvesting after 2 days. Hardly any tech points and that damng monkey keeps popping up. Oh and let us not forget the typhoon....

HAHA the drama

Backing up your Village Sim game requires a degree of active management on your part to be truly effective, since I don't consider the occasional HotSync a good backup strategy.

Village Sim creates a separate savegame file (VillageSavegame.pdb) on your Palm and updates it every time the game is exited (v1.1 displays a message informing the user of this fact when you exit the game). Each time you perform a HotSync, that file is copied to your PC, and is placed in the 'backup' folder for Palm desktop (usually \program files\palm (or palmone)\user_name\backup). Depending upon when you last performed a HotSync, that file may or may not be useful to you (you can note the date/time of the file when you are looking at the contents of the backup folder). Double-clicking on the file VillageSavegame.pdb will put it in QuickInstall, ready to be HotSynced back onto your Palm. Since the game probably wasn't paused when you last HotSynced, you'll have to change your Palm's system clock to match the date/time of the savegame file before you launch Village Sim to keep your game from experiencing a period of neglect (but you can bring up the game, pause it, exit, and set the Palm's clock back to the correct time).

Even if recovering an earlier savegame file isn't a good option for you, here is a method of "backing up" multiple iterations of your savegame file that requires no additional investment in backup software:

The first thing you want to do is set your game speed to "paused" so that, no matter how long it is between when you save it and when you restore it, you won't have any disasters resulting from the passage of time. Then exit your game and perform a HotSync. That will put the most recent savegame on your PC. The savegame file (VillageSavegame.pdb) will be stored in the 'backup' folder described above. To be extra safe, you can copy the savegame file to another folder somewhere else on your PC, so that subsequent HotSync operations won't overwrite it. You can either rename the savegame file(s) to something meaningful (until you need to restore it, at which point you'll need to restore the original filename), or you can store each savegame file in its own subfolder. I use that method myself to keep many savegames from various stages of the game to use for testing purposes.

If disaster ever strikes and you need to restore your backup, go to the folder where your savegame file is stored and double-click it. That will put it into QuickInstall, ready to be HotSynced back onto your Palm. Perform another HotSync and VOILA! You're ready to start right up from where you left off. The only oddity that you will notice is that your "Realtime hours played" statistic will reflect the total time that the game has been "running" - including the time it was paused. That's just how that particular statistic works.

Ah so desu ka!
I also have the game on the card, and your explanation was worth a lot to me. I HAD noticed that the Palm loads the game from the card each time(please wait...), and keeps the savegame in native storage, but I never followed the dots to realize why I was occasionally losing savegames. Fortunately, I have been using a variation of your backup folder trick, so no great loss, just a frustrating mystery, now solved.