Game Development: Season's Greetings

[Amanda44]

Crops will fall fallow in winter. Fallow crops can be harvested at any time for a reduced amount of seeds of the relevant plant.

What does fallow mean, they stop growing? Usually when I hear fallow that means nothing is planted.

I'm confused by this as well ... does it mean that once you harvest crops on fallow ground they can't be re-planted until the spring?

[Redlaw]

Basically they are going into a sleeping stage during the winter.

[Schattengaenger]

First of: Great patch. Thank you!

Secondly, I certainly wouldn't mind if you increased the percentage of spring, fall and winter.
Meaning that there could be distributed 15 days of spring, 15 days of fall, 20 days of winter and 30 days of summer.

I get that future hazards will want the players to have shorter winters,
but it would also be nice to have the players stock up on preserveble food for winter.
Since the only real change is winter I feel 10 days is a bit too short for a meaningful impact on gameplay.

[elilasol]

There is a bug! There are invisible what might be trees underground! They have collision and cannot be interacted with otherwise.

There, I think I finally managed to track this down. Should be fixed.

looks like it was ghostpipes, good to know.

[NeoBasilisk]

First of: Great patch. Thank you!

Secondly, I certainly wouldn't mind if you increased the percentage of spring, fall and winter.
Meaning that there could be distributed 15 days of spring, 15 days of fall, 20 days of winter and 30 days of summer.

I get that future hazards will want the players to have shorter winters,
but it would also be nice to have the players stock up on preserveble food for winter.
Since the only real change is winter I feel 10 days is a bit too short for a meaningful impact on gameplay.

Being unable to farm for over a week is already a significant logistical issue if you need to feed a large number of animals. You need to increase your farming output by 17% during the rest of the year.

[NeoBasilisk]

Do we need to worry about what happens if a knarr is in a river that gets frozen?

[rhzk]

Seasons should be IRL time speed. Or i never play hafen again!

[MagicManICT]

Seasons should be IRL time speed. Or i never play hafen again!

Nobody wants to spend 3 months of doing nothing. I think this is a reasonable balance at this point. I agree it might be a bit longer, but I don't want to see it come to "Don't Starve" level of survival, either, in winters. I love that game. It's a series of short challenges, not weeks or months. I don't mind dealing with it because it is relatively short (a couple hours play time with default settings).

@jorb: Added the game to my Steam wishlist. Looking forward to seeing more about it. Looking into the devlopers a bit, and saw a few links back to Paradox Interactive. I'm guessing that's where you know these folks from (the work you did there prior to Salem, that is).

[ricky]

Great update. I wonder what 2009 jorb and loftar would think knowing it would only take them 10 years to implement seasons.

@jorb Congrats on the new job, I hope it's as fun and engaging as it sounds
@loftar keep up the good work, cant wait to see all the new, weird bugs seasons have created.

I hope seasons bring a wealth of new content and dynamic mechanics to the game.

[Ants]

Awesome. I hope we get seasonal forageables soon