Rant about starting season

I think the devs really need to figure out how to separate starting time from zombie progression. I’ve had it up to here with having to choose between slamming face-first into all the tough zombies and not getting bloody spring at the start of the game. And being able to choose how fast the zombies progress is nice and all, but it doesn’t even look like it does anything. I try to set it up so it advances slow enough that it’ll still be basic by the time I’m starting after 90 days of spring but nope, everything still bad shows up. It’s clunky and dumb and something that should not have to be dealt with by the player.

There’s no reason to have a hard-coding starting date and then be able to start some other time, but have to WAIT from the start point that the game dictates it starts at. If I set the start to summer, bloody start in summer, do not start in spring and then WAIT until summer! Jesus Christ. It throws the entire balance of the game off just because I don’t want to have to fuck with snow.

lol calm down

I generally agree though, I’d love to be able to start in winter on day 1 of the cataclysm.

Planned. But you know, pile of things to do.

The problem with season is that some things are hardcoded to think that “time 0” is the first day of spring.
I’ll check it out, it may be easier than I think it is.

It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be…
Maybe I’ll retry later, but for now I’m giving up.

The whole calendar system assumes that 0 is the 0.00 of 1st day of the spring. Then there’s the issue of save compatibility - fixing new starts would fuck up the old ones.

Here’s what I managed: https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/12496

Did the lore state anything about the season, when the cataclysm took place?
If so adjusting the starting season w/out allowing the monsters to evolve would kinda be against the spirit/FUN of things.
Maybe adding an option to stall the evolution x days?

The lore hasn’t ever said anything about the starting date of the Cataclysm (day has been nailed down, but not the date). In fact prior to the current calendar system we used to start at the start of summer instead of spring IIRC.

Yeah, I think we moved from summer to spring, and then the weather overhauls happened so ‘first day of spring’ was still like ‘last day of winter’.

I too am for decoupling adventure-start-time from spring day 1, for sanity reasons. I understand if that’s an utter asspain though. For now i kinda like the challenge of starting early spring anyway. XD

The sensible thing would be to have an actual timestamp function for various events such as the start of the cataclysm and then to base various timers such as monster evolution off that.