Seasons now 91 days long? (OP updated with links and Kevin's answers)

[Trigon]

That’s a good point. Honestly farming seems to be getting pushed towards an NPC base activity. You have them do all the tilling, harvesting, and preserving, leaving you all the free time you want for other nonsense. I don’t know if that’s a point in it’s favor or not though.

[Vastin]

It’s very hard to see value to farming in a single player game unless there’s a big push towards the construction of substantial NPC settlements. I personally don’t even keep NPC’s with me on the road, much less a settlement, as I find them incredibly inconvenient, so I can’t speak to that game experience personally.

This mirrors reality. A single individual in a world mostly devoid of other people would in fact have a much easier time supporting themselves through hunting and foraging than they would through farming - farming is a capital intensive endeavor (on the individual scale), that only makes sense if you’re trying to support a larger community that would otherwise exhaust foraging opportunities within their effective territory.

The game currently reflects this - though foraging is really VERY productive once your survival gets up a little bit, so you’d need a decent size community before you’d be able to exhaust foraging resources in the current model. Now, very long seasons would make it somewhat easier to exhaust forage (assuming bushes only refresh once each season) - not for an individual who can simply move to new foraging zones, but for a static community, a 90 day season would probably see them exhausting the local forests of all forage before too long, and at that point they’d need to start farming to make up the difference.

This does depend somewhat on how animal spawns work. At the moment animal spawns seem to be pretty plentiful and a couple moose and deer properly butchered generate a LOT of food (as they should).

Now of course, the spawn density of forage bushes could be reduced, or the success rate of foraging could be reduced to make farming more attractive by comparison or to force more frequent scavenger migration for those with no interest in farming.

[latogato]

Hi survivors!
We asked some questions about the change on github and Kevin answered them. The game will change… a lot.

[TheZoneWizard]

So we go from 14 days to 90 and skip over the 30 month because why?..oh wait 3, 30 day months = 1 season? Times 4…ohhhhhh kkkkk…12 months in 1 year right?

I’m kinda slow sometimes but this the discussion right? Wouldn’t that change make perfect sense? 0_o

[bostltch]

What? The game doesn’t specifically count months… this post doesn’t make much sense to me so I’m confused on what your actual point is. That making the game count 12 months rather than four seasons but keep it the same total amount of days? That doesn’t change anything other than wording.

[vassock]

Not sure what you mean. I always play with 91 day seasons. Why would it make the game less interesting?

[hydroplatypus]

If they are pushing for farming to be an NPC thing, as @Trigon suggested, then this change would make a lot more sense. It would be a mid/late game thing, but would essentially automate food production, with the player able to drive in their deathmobile a couple times a season to pick up all the food they’ll need, freeing them up to raid/loot/etc.

[pingpong]

Days now will be changed to 91/season, but the rest of the game minus farming is supposedly going to stay the same. Basically you’ll be a god by the first winter, unless they nerf almost everything, solely for “realism”. I have directly questoned devs who say “it’s too hard to do farming rescaling etc” but from scans of the code you can see you can add a single on-world scaling factor (which they already fudged in for 91-length seasons). Literally the only argument for it is “I want the game to be a boring, ‘realistic’, slog.” There is literally no reason why NPCs can’t use current farming, or automate farming entirely. They’re saying there’s a lot of overhauls with cities, regions, and probably scale coming, but it’s all for the sake of dragging out gameplay because they (the devs/long-term players) prefer doing one thing over and over and over, whether it be city-clearing, farming, etc. It’s a bad sign when people start asking about auto-travel, auto-eat/drink, auto-farm etc.

I can understand them wanting to do a massive NPC world with lots of crap going on in cities and outskirts, but it’ll get boring if you’re not into doing the same things over and over.

[Trigon]

I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to automate some things. Making NPCs worthwhile was always a goal on the horizon. They should be doing the farming while the player gets to do the fun stuff. So you aren’t forced to deal with the hundreds of key presses necessary to swing it.

In fact you mention it being boring doing the same thing over and over but then deride auto-travel. If I already cleared a road I would like to not have to spend my real time driving my ass back to the last town because I accidentally left my atomic coffee maker (which happens distressingly often) the whole point of a certain amount of automation is so you don’t have to continuously do just one thing.

[munbeam]

A heat dependent character I had use to practically hibernate through the winter because food was easy and time was meaningless. It was safer to stay in place and catch up on some things. Longer seasons sorta make that more difficult but it does give new opportunities. What if we could fill a stockpile type furniture with water and a particular craftable food to skip a season? The bear-man can literally hibernate as I understand. Spending some resources to do the same might not be too unusual. Such a mechanic could be useful to access the full year without having to play it. The longer season would make that and some of the mutations more meaningful as far as taking advantage of a niche.

[Trigon]

I agree. Boredom is probably the biggest killer of my characters right now. And being able to wait out certain parts of the season would be helpful.

[kevin.granade]

Generally the goal is to make the world as immersive and realistic as possible, and adjust the interface to let you just deal with the interesting parts. Features like time skipping, auto-travel, and even hibernation would contribute to that.

[Tazeell]

All I can say is it’s a good thing updating is optional and old versions are available. There are points where remembering it’s a video game is more important then immersion. Video games need pacing and development following 91 day seasons sounds like pacing just got shot.

[Fris0uman]

It’s probably because it’s the beginning of 91 days season implementation, once all the good time skipping stuff is in it’s going to be ok.
Also it might be a problem of personal taste (or time you have available to play), but so far I don’t see problem with 91 days even if I might get bored of my latest character before I finish spring. But then again I’m 71days in a stylish broken cyborg run and I haven’t managed to remove any broken cbm yet and I’m still far from being the prettyest survivor in the land, so there’s things to do to occupy yourself in a 91 days season world.

[Vastin]

I have to say I’m a huge not-fan of the 90 day seasons, and I’m kind of depressed that someone even reminded me of that.

In my current game I just reached Spring 29 and was like ‘oh thank god, finally a change of seasons’.

Now I am reminded that I have another 60 days of spring, and I’m already well into my crafting mid game. I’m going to max out the tech tree and be done with this character before summer and that really, really sucks.

I guess I’ll have to go edit or mod the season length. Frankly I find the 30 day seasons obnoxiously long and tedious in terms of game play. I understand that there may be more time spinning mechanics in the future - but lets be honest here, a HUGE proportion of my in game time is already spent in shelter, reading books, cooking and sleeping. Increasing this proportion of passive game time four-fold or more just to support a ‘realistic’ season length could kill the pacing of a game that’s already on the border of being a bit too slow and passive.

I’d rather we say that the portals have fucked up the seasons and thrown the Earth off axis so that our seasons are shorter and weirder, or whatever. Anything but stretching out the dead time dramatically further than it already is. I just can only spend so much time sitting in a pile of books and crafting materials watching a clock tick.

[Tazeell]

Luckily (for now) you can still manually lower the seasons in world creation. Playing with 90 day seasons is horribly boring and I would not recommend it.

[Vastin]

Yeah. I haven’t tried changing this value after a game is started - is that feasible or is it going to gank my current game?

[Tazeell]

I don’t know, never changed it mid game. Probably better off scrapping the save.

[Mantar]

You can do it, but it may cause some weirdness. It seems to be safer to use the debug menu and change the date.

[deoxy]

Put me down as another one who thinks this is a terrible idea.

As multiple other people have pointed out, everything is scaled down, and THAT’S GOOD. “Realism” would be thousands of houses, taking weeks to do a halfway decent check of each house in a single housing division by yourself, spending an entire day walking across a single decent-sized city, spending several days walking from one city to another, etc.

Follow that up with “adjust the interface to let you just deal with the interesting parts.” Hint: That’s what we already had, that’s you’re taking OUT.

And this is for farming and animal husbandry? OK, let’s talk about that and “realism”. Realism: farming without modern equipment, supplies, and KNOWLEDGE is a full-time job. Animal husbandry isn’t that far behind. If you want realism, those parts are just going to be, essentially, DROPPED, or handled primarily by NPCs who don’t go out “adventuring” with you.

I’m OK with that, for entirely “realism” reasons. But messing up the rest of the game balance in the name of “realism” for something that doesn’t belong in the game for realism reasons has nothing good to be said about it, and plenty that isn’t good.

All of that said, you’re the one putting in the work, so if you want to take out the parts you say you’re trying to put in to get “realism” that is the opposite of realistic, that’s your prerogative… and I’ll either never update again or work around it, because, while I’m a darn good programmer, that’s my JOB, and I don’t want to do it anymore after spending 50ish hours a week on it already.