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

It is not a problem technically, it is a problem from game play perspective.

I play at 28 day season, because that way, I do have a harvest (entire point of farming) before I reach the endgame. In other words, farming helps me reach the endgame - brings variety of food etc.

With 90 day season, the game pacing will be that I plant at mid game, and return to my farm in my deathmobil as a demigod, mutated and CBMed to the brim. Just to retire and watch my plants mature while sharpening my diamond katana on the grind stone.

In other words, with 90 day season, farming does not help you reach the endgame, it is something you do in retirement.

And if other progress like reading, crafting etc. is slowed down to match the real season length? The game will end up with pacing of grindy korean MMO, boring as f*ck.

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No, i donā€™t. We have 14 days seasons, also we have ā€œcitiesā€ which means a bunch of random houses with few dozen of ex-inhabitants. We can master any skill in hours or days. We craft things in minutes or hours.

The game should have small scale for everything to ensure its variety. If the seasons are long, most people will never live (or get bored) to see a season change. Our characters will be end-game heros before the summer. We could craft insane ammount of items within a season.

The small time scale gives game immersion. We travel and clear some (small) places and a season passed. It looks stupid if we can clear dozens of cities in a season. Also nomad characters should have to plunder whole cities for food to survive a season, because the season is long but the city loot is few in comparison. That is hilarious.

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This is not a problem, its meant to work like that.

But it is a problem. People wear clothes for the actual day. If it is spring but the weather is cold, you will wear warm clothes.

How is that bad? Season starts work like that because the weather doesnā€™t change instantaneously, using warm clothes on early spring is no tragedy.

It is not about the weather, it is about the clothes, they was not updated properly when the weather code changed. The point is many starting character has no warm clothes. It is silly and annoying because this slows down the already vulnerable characters.

Yeah. Maybe not all classes, but it makes sense that your average person would already be wearing warm clothes in cold weather.

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Some people are overreacting there. Many players were using 90 or 91 long seasons when 14 was standard, without problems. Now, you can still play short seasons without any isue even if standard lenght is different.
What about newbies? They will still die. And does it matter if they will die in summer/autumn or in late long-spring? If anything, it will be more newb friendly, because after 42 days they will be able still to run naked. If they ever feel need to die of frostbite, they can shorten seasons no problem, while devs can do their job better.

Define overreacting. :slight_smile:
Seriously, to me this change is an immersion breaker. I will be an unstoppable survivor, a master of everything before the summer and it is silly. I donā€™t want to copy-paste, so here is my opinion from the github discussion.

My definition of overreacting: Acting like this change is end of the world, while you can set one number to lower value and everything stays the same as it was.
And new people wont even notice.

It is not that simple, it should change crafting, reading times and possible lot of other things.

If the game will be too slow pace that could discourage new and old players too.

If they donā€™t change them then we can become a master hacker in 3 days and god of the zombie apocalypse within half season! We could clear dozens of cities in a season! Also we will eat all foods from whole cities because the seasons are long but the cities - well, everything - are small.

This is just silly, everybody will notice it.

Also this change came because of the farming and animal breeding changes, they donā€™t work properly with 14 days. So no, we canā€™t just change the season length if we donā€™t like the default.

You realize you can make the cities bigger correct? You can also change the construction time scaling and if you donā€™t like having maxed out skills turn on skill rust. Farming has always worked fine for me not sure about that but the breeding yes, that would get out of hand but if that really bothers you just go kill all the dogs around your base or if you play with a mobile base, just ignore them.

I know i can customize the settings, but i care about the default settings. If they are bad, then the game is bad by default. The farming and breeding problems are not my words Kevin wrote in the github announce the 91 days season length needed for them to work as intended.

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For me the biggest problem is that game pacing is simply not supporting 91 day seasons correctly, and slowing down the pacing to make it fit into 91 days per season would make the game extremely slow and boring. With 14 day seasons, when winter starts you are usually somewhere in early end-game. With 91 day seasons, at the same time you already went through all the content game has to offer or already quit and started new character.

I canā€™t really imagine how 91 day seasons could work in CDDA without making seasons irrelevant at all.

Edit: One middle ground I can see is 30 day seasons and default start in the late summer/early autumn. This way:

  • Newbies can have easier early game, with less worrying about freezing to the point of getting severe penalties, the food is easy to get.
  • The clock is ticking - temperatures from the start are getting lower and lower, forcing you to get warmer clothes as time progresses. Food from the wild also becomes less and less available.
  • Seasons are still important and in average game you are likely to see all of them.

30 days still seem like too much for me personally, but for someone new to the game it being the default should give enough time to learn the game mechanics while still providing challenge later on. (30 day winter is still looong and requires storing/gathering lots of supplies to survive it)

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Iā€™m very open since I played with 20-30 days before. But itā€™s gonna take me a while on my current game to actually get the through a whole year and provide more feedback thatā€™s more than just theory and conjecture.

My main issue with this is that I like winter starts. This means that I have to wait 90 days + grow time before Iā€™ll ever have any kind of harvested food. By then Iā€™ll be geared up really well, probably mutated, probably cybernetically enhanced. By then Iā€™ll be getting bored.

Which is a shame because I enjoy farming.

That being said, I do think thisthread has had some overreactions. Ultimately this comes down to ā€˜You can still change season lengthā€™.

As for crafting and reading, theyā€™ve already said that crafting was primarily based on hours, so there shouldnā€™t be much that changes there. As for reading, I mean, currently, you can get at least 3 (to maybe six or seven?) skill points in one ā€˜dayā€™ of hanging out in your base. I think reading could handle some nerfs without :

o_o Overdramatic.

People bringing this point over and over, so here are direct quotes from git discussion between me and lead developer.

To me, this abrupt change feels more like ā€œNope, itā€™s too hard to proper implement features to work with variable season length. Letā€™s ditch it.ā€

Thatā€™s also absolutely true. This is a feature that requires an inordinate amount of effort to maintain. We have hundreds of potential features to implement, and this one doesnā€™t make the cut.

Do you guys realize that yes, you can change the season length and it is perfectly fine to do so for now, but as features will be developed exclusively with default season length in mind and no support for different season length, such settings change will become more and more nonviable?

Kevin goes as far as prohibiting others to implement feature with variable season length support, so even in case someone does want to support it, he canā€™t.

Not sure what was dramatic about that sentence, but whatever.

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What if there was more to do in game ? What if it took longer to reach end game not because of a scaling of the learning curve but because there was much more to do, would it be ok then to have 91 days season ?

I can answer only for myself, but

Yes

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Yes, but I canā€™t imagine how could you make literally any game so engaging and content filled to make 91 day seasons viable, through.

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