Gameplay

1. Your villagers will apparently have common genes inside one village and not only parents genes effect what villages children will look like. This makes hard to keep annoying features off from spreading to whole village. So when you start make sure all your villagers have noses that you can stand to watch 14 times in every generation now and forever - if needed. Don't pay too much attention to your villagers hair colors: original twins are almost always born with black and light hair color, so you can't choose your color scale anyway.

If you aren't happy with your starting couples looks, you can always go to your facebook settings, remove Village Life and start over. This may feel pity, but on the other hand you recover bad mood caused by this in hour or half, but if you take villagers with pinokkio nose, may be you watch it for month on every your villager and it stops feeling funny and personal anymore. It can also effect your chances to match your villagers with other players villagers. After you have been building your village with care, small details can start bothering.

2. When game starts, avoid clicking even near any work your villagers are doing, and buy keys with gems every time you have enough gems. This protects you wasting your gems to completeing works, and getting stucked later. Loosing 25 gems to something else than keys is already critical for whole future progress, so keep it in mind!

To avoid accidents 

* Never target villager directly from screen, instead use menu in right bot corner of your screen to target villagers.

* Decorate later, let your villagers finish all works nearby before you start renovating nearby

* When you harvest something that grows in a tree, click the tree, not the basket once the work is done

* If you clicked villagers work by accident, don't release mouse key. Instead move it to corner of screen and scroll view until you don't see whole villager anymore, before releasing it. Gems are not spend if you release mouse key far enough from where you pressed it down.

3. Build houses early as possible: At beginning your situation is quite ideal compared to what it possibly will be for long time again: you got 3 working adults, very little needs that are easy to fill, plenty of extra keys and lot of time for other things than keeping up level speed.
Use these resources to unlock one or two next houses and resources needed for them, as long you can do that, and start building them immediately, with one adult per time so rest of them are free for keeping up leveling.
This alllows you focus better to developing other things in your village in future, and you won't be suddently completely stucked for 3 days while waiting some building to finish, just to make villagers stop complaining and have some fun finally.

4. Unlock 2-person houses instead of multiple person houses: they cost less keys and fill your villagers needs just as good - even better because first 2-person house to unlock is already better than first multiple person one. They also take less time, maybe in return you get less beds at once, but on the other hand your villagers won't be "bound to" building same house for too long per time.
This is important because when you got only 3 adult villagers, may be hard to run villages other functions same time if one is bound to building it. If additionally another one is pregnant and you got only 1 working villager to fill mothers and two childrens needs beside their own ones, there is nothing you can do.

5. Let your villagers drink some water, eat foods that they fancy (and that are already in storage) between building and crafting projects. Filling their wishes is way to keep up gaining happiness and takes only some minutes to wait for that. Those minutes they also regain energy, so it's not wasted time.

6. Spend a moment at start to check which skills your villagers got, to have some idea of tactic.

* Lumberjacks have got most time and energy taking works at start, miners soon after, so avoid using your best lumberjack to other tasks if his energy isn't full and nothing else available for him to spend it for.

* At beginning you won't either have farm, so spend first your farmer villagers energy to end or put them build time taking things like houses.

Later farmers will have plenty of hours taking works (15-30min with good farmer) but those works take nearly no energy at all, and need to be done only once or twice per game time, so you can still keep using farmers a lot.

What to do when villagers are too unhappy to have fun?

When your villagers are unabled to have fun they got red mark over green smiley at corner of their picture. Try to fill needs that you are able to, and give them some time. Usually at least one of them gets mooded up enough to have fun and keep you leveling: leave that villager alone and use cranky ones to slave work instead.

Try to unlock fun buildings and entertainment stuff before you unlock foods, because villagers want foods randomly in short periods: at morning when you lock in it can be apples and strawberrys that you don't need to unlock, at afternoon potatoes and gabbage that you didn't get unlocked yet. Missing fun devices instead don't disappear from their thoughts for a minute.

Finish flower bed, duck quest (level 15), inspect fallen tree quest (level 18) and deer quest (level 20) as early as possible, to not get late in keys.

Babies - as stated in article of villagers lifecycle - are easier to keep having fun for your level up. They give around 10 points per time, which keeps repeating, so it's pretty good bonus to your happiness production already.

Skills and professions

Skills for teen ager: You got a mail in your mailbox "your villager has come to age" and can choose him skill to develop. He has already inherited 25% boost to some skill from his mother and father, and would be good that you chosen same skill that he already has, to make him save 50% or even 75% of time in tasks that he is specialized to.

Why not put little bit skill to everything? 

Even when you have 75% miner, it doesn't mean he needs to always be the miner. Collecting easier resources (other than his mastered skill) won't still take him more than some minutes, so you can keep delegating him much more tasks than just one that he is specialized at. If he for example collects wood for fire, which normally takes one minute, sacrificing 25% (~15min) from his mining speed would only save 15 seconds.

Advantage is that you can delegate most time taking mining tasks of 1 hour or more to him, and get them done in 15 minutes (and same with farming, foraging and wood cutting of course). And when there comes hour lasting task for wood cutting, you can delegate that to some actual wood cutter. Most of time your villagers will be able to do all the tasks in 15 min anyway, so you can still mostly command to work which villager you want. Just leave hardest tasks to the professionals, and you won't need to wait for hours with anything.

You can't always have all 4 professionals in your village, but leaving time taking tasks to villagers who have 2 or 3 points in same skill, saves 30-45 minutes out of one hour. This means 15 - 20 more overall energy gain in hour for your village, because villagers who are working don't gain any energy at all.

So choose mothers or fathers skill to be also villagers own skill. Exception is if you already know your future spouses skill: in that case may be just as good option to choose same skill for their children to have 50% in same skill from parents (=75% when own skill is add to that).

Villagers lifecycle

Baby (days 0-2): your villager haven't any hair yet, and he seems to do nothing except crawl around.

You can still earn vitally important happiness points by crafting a baby creche for him to take daily naps at. Keep an eye in his thought bubbles, and don't treat him less worth because actually he is at this life stage even more worth to your happiness points creation.

He isn't half as picky: while adults need to be given all five items they fancy that they would use even one, only item baby will need to start producing points is a baby creche (which is fast to build), and only food he needs to have to keep producing them, milk.

Maybe he doesn't work for goods he spends, but on the other hand there isn't any cheaper way to produce happiness points than feeding him (takes only 2 lowest wood pieces and spends zero energy). 

Unlike your adult villagers who are building village, he also got plenty of time to activities that produce lot of happiness points - as newborn that is taking naps in a baby creche so build it as soon as possible.

Toddler (days 2-4): your villager has learnt to walk and needs rather toys than day naps. He also got some hair now.

Craft a toy rattle and remember to start task again immediately once he has used first rattle to end.

Feeding him time to time is still good idea: it's again plenty of nearly free happiness points that you can't enjoy long anymore.



Child (days 4-13): Your baby has grown up and demands for sure every possible free time activity there is. It's very hard to keep him happy anymore, because he got adult villagers wishes and demands, but on the other hand he still can't do a thing himself. Good side is that he doesn't neccessarily need own bed slot from villages houses yet, and he still keeps producing happiness points while adults work.

Teen age (days 13-18): Child can't date yet, but you can already start searching for spouse for him, because he will be old enough in 5 days, which is short time to search. Good places are Village Life official facebook page, and Village Friends community page.

You can finally start giving him some work to do, and for now on hardest time is behind - he will only help you. He also needs own bed slot from house, can be this happens already at age 12.

In the picture teenager is building a house for himself and his future spouse. He is now little older than 14 years, so will take about same 3 days for him to grow up, than to build the house. Planning is the key with teenagers.

Young adult (18-40): This is best time to start having babies as soon as possible so start dating at least in 2 days after aging up. This will prevent your village dying to lack of people. Of course, couple can also end up to spouses village, but don't be afraid of this because you still need to marry to keep population growing, and earlier the better.

There is rumours about villagers possibly being able to come pregnant even at 50+, but you can't choose when couple wants to have a baby (except by paying for game), and it can take long before they do. So only way to have 2 children for sure, is to marry around 19-21 years.

Adult (40-60): Your villagers physical appearance changes a little bit. Hair gets lighter and can look little different than before - although hair cut doesn't change.

Elder (60-85): Appearance changes again and villager can't certainly have any children anymore. He will pass at age of 85 or 90, and you will have some gems. Villagers don't have graves so far, so you can only see them in family tree - if everything gone as supposed and they formed family, or if they have siblings - and remember them with warm thought when using your gems obtained.