Saturday, March 17, 2012

Virtual Villagers: Extinction

Things in my village took a decided turn for the worse on my third day of playing. It turned out the honey supply didn't replenish so my villagers actually didn't have a source of food to gather while I was at work. When I came home most of them had died of starvation. There were only three survivors at that point. All of them sick, and all of them had been children so they had no skills. One man, one woman, and one little kid. That's enough to rebuild a functioning civilization though, right? Right!

The first thing that happened was a random event which asked if my only remaining female wanted to drink a weird potion she found. Why not! It ended up cloning her into three identical people (though only one remained chief of my village) which was amazingly good for me. I quickly got to work making babies on all three of my newly cloned women. Genetic diversity isn't going to be a thing in my village, but at least we'd have three more kids!

I then discovered a new source of food. My chief could visit the food storage unit and make a lot of food appear by magic. (I was trying to make her eat some of the mushrooms I'd gathered.) She could do it once per day and if I'd done that the first two days I might have had enough food for my people to survive the third day... Die and learn I guess! I couldn't try to work out any of the puzzles since I didn't have anyone with any skills. So I made my babies, hoped for more food, and left.

And then forgot to come back for a couple days. It was really bad. Once again my people had run out of food and all the adults had starved to death. I was left with only 3 people: the 3 babies from the last go. All male. All very sick. All still children. The fruit tree had hundreds of food on it so I did have a source of food if I'd had a functioning adult society. But with no adults to gather that food and no potential for making new villagers my society was done. One of the three died within a minute of my starting to play. I let the other two die off a short time after and the experiment was done.

I now have some ideas for how to better feed my people. The honey isn't renewable. The fruit tree is. My chief can make food appear by magic. It's also possible I should check in twice a day (when I get home from work and when I go to bed maybe) in case disaster has struck and I can mitigate some of the damage. And going 3 days between checking in is probably going to doom my little tribe...

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