Weather, temperature, seasons

[Cookie]

You just need to balance it by having seasonal bonuses. For example you may not be able to grow anything when there is snow all over the ground, but that was traditionally the season for hauling work because nice hard frozen ground, a slippery low friction mantle of snow and a sled meant that getting logs out of the forest was a quarter of the work that is was in other seasons. It was also the season for visiting and travel for the same reason. A nine hour journey in the summer on a bad road could easily be accomplished in four with a sleigh instead of a wagon.

It's the food supply that is perplexing. If there is a really mild winter like in Southern Britain you can have winter crops like turnips and cabbage to keep your brand new player alive but then really you only have two seasons: summer (with pretty changing colours) and winter with occasional slush and plenty of rain. If you have a hard winter you could make it much easier to hunt animals like deer that would get bogged down in the snow... but you don't want to make it too easy either. You could make things painfully complex, such as by ruling that things like cheese and other preserves only ripen in the winter and have to be consumed by the summer or they spoil but that would be even worse. The oldbies would swear shockingly and there would be no trickle down to the newbies. It is far easier to toss 132 mouldy cheeses into a snowbank than it is to try to trek half a supergrid to deliver them to the food bank.

I'd love a four season Haven and Hearth with food products specific to each season but finding a balance could involve the poor devs going to post-post-graduate school and each getting a doctorate in law just to hang onto the student apartment where the server lives long enough to get it done.

[sabinati]

sleds would be cool.

the food balance is, indeed, the main problem. i suppose there's always fishing, and there would be some hunting in the winter... but there would obviously have to be a major shift in the way crops and hunger work. and yes, additional seasonal crops. but i'm not entirely convinced that seasons would really improve gameplay. i love the idea of it, but when you consider the fact that i need to eat a cupboard full of food every day, it's hard to imagine it working well.

[VowOfSilence]

Well, maybe we should stick with weather and temperature since there are already 2 topics on seasons.

Something that bothers me a bit is that day & night feel almost the same.
Imo night should be more difficult to handle - Day should be "offense", night should be "defense", at least in the beginning.

Random ramblings:
- a temperature bar. It raises during the day and lowers during night or rain. It's also effected by equipment, abilites and surroundings.
- if temperature gets too low, players can get sick and will need medicine (sickness state could also be triggered by other stuff like poisonous food, snakebites etc)
- Fire warms and keeps wild animals away during the night, but rain + low temperature makes it impossible to light fires, which makes it a pretty nasty combination

[Cookie]

Whenever the minimap fails to load I curse the fog and claim that visibility has dropped to about ten feet in each direction. Outside of that there is nothing but whiteness.... So we already do have weather conditions, of a sort.

At the risk of being murdered by all the dairy farmers in the game, could we have thunderstorms turn the milk?