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...

More Virtual Villagers

I got home from work today and was curious to see what my little village of Trekkers had accomplished in a day. It turned out 5 years had passed and both of the babies were running around as children which freed up the female members of my tribe for other tasks. My people had done some research and cleared out the bee hive of honey but had otherwise not accomplished much. They didn't get much work done on the building under construction and barely stayed even food-wise despite strip-mining all known sources of food. I hope it respawns!

Tooling around a little in game I found a second source of food (a tree I'd planted had started bearing fruit) and forced some villagers to 'embrace' until another baby showed up. I tried for another but it turns out 10 people is the max until I finish construction on that building. I also found out that Spock had leveled researching enough to start collecting some junk on the map and once I'd found all the bits he built an alchemy lab. Now I can send my children around gathering random herbs. Then McCoy can combine 3 herbs into a potion which lasts 5 minutes and does crazy things. I didn't jot down the first couple that I did but then I decided that tracking potion results would be a reasonable thing to do.

I put a couple together that really made sense once I thought about it. Three bits of a cactus that looks like aloe? A healing potion! (Which I think just meant I couldn't level up healing skill by fixing up my slightly wounded people.) Three roses? A love potion! (It made any adult that drank it run and 'embrace' someone else.)

I also spent my research points on my first tech upgrade. I decided to take a level of nature which supposedly increases the return on food collecting. My feeling is if my village is going to die it's going to be from starvation so anything I can do to increase my food stash has to be good! (And it was the cheapest tech.)

Virtual Villagers

I've recently been tipped off about the game series Virtual Villagers while reading the Iron Man Mode site. The basic idea seems to be it's a 'god' sim where you direct the lives of a small village of cavemen. You teach them how to gather food, and build houses, and research stuff. People get old and die and you need to repopulate your village as time passes or go extinct. Random weird collections, puzzles to solve... Seems pretty interesting, right?

There's a twist added in. The game keeps playing while you're not playing. (Well, I imagine it just simulates time passing when you next log on.) So if you don't set your village up with a solid plan for survival you'll go away for the weekend and come back with everybody dead. I don't know just how long it takes for time to pass but I imagine if you don't have lots of babies you could come back with everyone just dead of natural causes!

The downside is when the game can easily handle 16 hour gaps it seems there isn't a lot of stuff to do in the game. I set up Spock in the research lab and Scotty to build things but if it's going to take them a day to do stuff... What is there for me to do? There are these little thingies that spawn randomly that I can send my children to collect but for the most part it seemed like I wanted to set some wheels in motion and then check back later.

One thing that is a little annoying is the tutorial made me get one of my female tribe members pregnant and now she spends all her time walking around taking care of a baby instead of building huts! I mean, I guess I need babies for the tribe to survive but I'm down to 3 functioning adults along with 2 mothers, 2 babies, and 2 children. The 3 year old girl (Janeway) found a cool robe which made her the chieftain of my tribe. Now instead of doing normal little child things like build a sandcastle she stands around and makes the adults better. Since she had nothing productive to do anyway that seemed great! Better her than one of my three functional adult males!