Spring is actually the worst season

[MrBunzy]

I can't agree more. Winter is cool thematically so I can accept not doing much for a week and playing with my kick sled, but extending it an additional 10 days of nothing is too long. Screw realism, trees take longer than a few weeks to grow irl, so its not like the haven treeplanting system has much basis in reality. Tree seeds need to start spawning way sooner so people arn't just sitting on their hands for literal weeks waiting for an arbitrary timer to end. Also the seasonality of medicine sucks, if toads are going to be unavailable for a third of the in game year there really needs to be an alternative to toad butter. Toads totally exist in irl spring anyway, I dont see why they shouldnt be in game too.

[MadNomad]

so the flaws outweight the ability to farm things?

[Amanda44]

Yes, winter is bad enough, it's atmospheric for the first couple of days and you get to play on the kicksled but with nothing else to do it wears off pretty fast and almost everyone in my kin list just took a break and played other games. To then add on ten days of spring is like a kick in the head! Yes, ok, for the first day it's fun to farm again and get things set back up ... but then what? There's no seeds, no fruit, no nuts, limited forageables and it affects just about everything else apart from farming, no silk making, no baking, no tree-planting, virtually nothing to forage and half the ingredients for meds are missing. (As bunsy just said.)
Oh, ofc you can mine for 20 days .. whoopee!

Also, I have a stunted tree in my garden that forms part of a symmetrical set and I can't get seeds for so I can't replant it, it's driving me crazy!

Can confirm that it does make players quit ... I have lost three sets of neighbours, two lots, a total of 5 players quit during the winter and the other one which had 3 players came back for about 2 days and then said this game was the most boring game ever and quit for good.

Seeds and forageables should definitely start coming back throughout the season and us not have to wait until the summer, it's just far too long in a gaming cycle.

[VDZ]

what a quirky indy game by some quirky indy devs who love listening to feedback

Just implementing common feedback because it's common is how you get mainstream games. Quirky indie games are quirky because they're made by devs who follow their own vision rather than making what people are already used to. If devs changed everything that commonly gets complained about regardless of their vision, Haven would have no death, no PVP, no wound system, no penalties for getting KOed, no risk in anything you do...basically, everything would be dumbed down. The devs seem to want seasons to be long-lasting periods of significantly altered gameplay; rather than just complaining that it shouldn't exist (the devs will never remove seasons), it's a lot more useful to point out what makes it unfun and make suggestions to improve it.

Personally, I think winter as it is now is completely fine. It's a unique season with its own advantages and disadvantages. Fall is less distinct and could use some more differentiation (it's pretty much summer with slightly different forageables). Spring, though, is pretty much Summer-lite - it offers absolutely nothing that Summer doesn't also offer (Coltsfoot doesn't count; it's just a bad curio with no unique properties), while still restricting access to things that are available in Summer and Fall. That this follows the very restrictive Winter season adds to the frustration.

With Winter being a hunting/mining season and Spring being a season of growth, perhaps farming-related activities could get unique boosts (not in the sense of increased growth speed but more like unique products for planting during spring (perhaps similar to how the Lady's Mantle improves at dawn))? Foraging is also something that finally becomes more relevant again after ten long days of Winter; why not boost foraging as well, be it in the form of unique forageables (or unique variations of existing ones), increased spawn rate, quality increase, etc?

Can confirm that it does make players quit ... I have lost three sets of neighbours, two lots, a total of 5 players quit during the winter and the other one which had 3 players came back for about 2 days and then said this game was the most boring game ever and quit for good.

The big question, though, is: To what extent is that because of Winter, and how much can it instead be attributed to people naturally quitting as they reach a certain level of progress? I also noticed my motivation starting to decrease halfway through winter - not because I was not enjoying winter, but because I had completely finished building my base, my Snekkja was ready for action, and I'd finally managed to build a minehole to get to layer 2 and explored the whole place. The only things left now are to repeat the things I've been doing to get better quality, a deeper layer, more trade goods...there's nothing 'new' for me to do anymore. (In that sense, winter actually helped as the kicksled greatly improves travel over land, allowing me to do 'new' things like long-distance trading, more exploration and easy land-based hunting.) People inevitably start quitting a few weeks in. Winter (and now Spring) just happens to also be a few weeks in. If there's a similar increase of quitting players the next time these seasons roll around that could imply the correlation may be causation, but in this case the timing is far too ambiguous.

[Glorthan]

With Winter being a hunting/mining season

Bears not being present during winter doesn't help this hypothesis. It's also harder to get to the oceans to hunt whales/orcas if you don't live on the edge of the continent (luckily I do).

The main thing that's easier is the nomad credo. Everything else sucks.

[Valnar]

With Winter being a hunting/mining season

Bears not being present during winter doesn't help this hypothesis. It's also harder to get to the oceans to hunt whales/orcas if you don't live on the edge of the continent (luckily I do).

The main thing that's easier is the nomad credo. Everything else sucks.

You'd think bears would spawn sleeping in small caves or those natural dugouts in winter.

[abt79]

I’m sure angry, hungry bears spawning in caves during winter is on some kind of long-forgotten Will Consider list, right behind season balance and fixing boat combat

Meanwhile, wowie a mine elevator! I’ll totally build that and not forget it exists next week!

[Amanda44]

@ VDZ ... other than the fact they literally told me that's why they were leaving.

These aren't experienced players, maybe one or two had played before but they are what you would refer to as casuals, one group being complete new comers who hadn't even gotten as far as getting their palisade up ... for these type of groups having to play for almost a month with nothing do to is simply 'not playing'. It's boring for all of us but imagine being a newcomer, what kind of gaming experience is it where your hands are tied right at the start of your game for such a long period of time.

When seasons were introduced last world it was at the end of the world, I had stock piles of just about everything under the sun, not to mention being fully operational, I found things to do, mining, silk, remaining credo's, questing, baking etc ... this time it was a whole different experience. During the summer I was busy setting up two pclaims, a vclaim, the farm, industry, raising stats, mats, getting livestock, obtaining all the skills and completed two credos ... before I knew it winter had arrived, I barely had enough crops to reseed let alone stockpiles of anything else. There were no mulberry tree's in my immediate area and when I travelled to where there were some, regularly I might add, every tree was stripped bare, just before winter I finally managed to get one, lol, 'ONE', mulberry which I planted and is now at 92% but ofc has no leaves. Same was true of apple and pear trees, so when everything snowed over I found myself in the same boat as my newbie neighbours with absolutely nothing to do except mine out my cave and build, which admittedly kept me occupied but now it's spring and I'm still just waiting on everything. I have all the mats for my great hall bar the h-leather so am now just trawling the swamps daily looking for candleberries as my two skeps just don't cut it. Lol.

In any game for any player having such limitations is just not fun. They really need to flesh out winter and spring with more seasonal activities and I'm pretty sure they are fully aware of this, it just needs to be done sooner rather than later.

[Hasta]

I have all the mats for my great hall bar the h-leather so am now just trawling the swamps daily looking for candleberries as my two skeps just don't cut it. Lol.

Offtopic but won't do it in PM on the offchance someone else may find it useful:
As my villagers discovered few days ago, they ninja-remade wild beehives to act more like anthills (newly spawned bees don't aggro immediately if you're already raiding the hive) which makes wild hives A LOT more accessible. Also they drop several times more loot than before. if you're able to deal with 1-2 bees, you may set up a beeskep farm of 20+ in a single day.

[bitza]

"yes, but you see, we added coltsfoot to make up for all that" - the devs, probably