Don’t hold back yourself, how we dare to voice our opinion and ask for furter explanation! Scandalum! 
I hardly believe the devs need your plea or i should care about it.
“makes less sense”. TO YOU, because YOU want realism uber alles. Here’s the sense: IT PLAYS WELL. Farming is going to be relegated to the garbage bin because it, and the more crap they shove over to longer timescales, will just not be fun unless I want to sit at the computer for HOURS waiting for things to happen. They’re going to make more and more changes, and realize at some point the game is becoming less and less fun to play. They won’t admit it’s because of the changes they make, and will just full steam ahead. Meanwhile, there will still be bugs, but they’ll be more annoying, and there will be fewer and fewer options to play the game as it used to.
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Exacly and i don’t see the benefit of that change at all.
This sums up this topic. If the devs would give a straight answer how they plan this part of the game everybody would calm down or throw a tantrum and leave. Maybe i just missed that from the torrent of answers, but i don’t know and it is annoying as hell.
“realism kills the game” comes around with every major change to the game and it seems that the answer is always the same : make your own branch of Cataclysm and keep it the way you like. There seems to be enough people unhappy with realism to be a viable solution
Right, this kind of “screw you people” is the worst reaction we can get. This just make us sad because it seems there are no answers for our questions.
Your tone implies that I’m inherently in support of this change (I’m not) I’m simply trying to give the idea its fair shake. There’s plenty that devs can do to build off the idea of longer seasons. 91 seems extreme to me, sure, but screeching about this being intentional changes by some sort of fictional “Uber realism alles” to ruin the game for everybody isn’t exactly constructive.
On the topic of farming becoming a garbage bin part of gameplay: Nobody really farms anyways since seasons are already so short. You can roll deep in your death mobile and get more food than you will ever use anyways, which is moot since farming is by definition mutually exclusive with a nomadic lifestyle. Even if you live sedentary with 14 day seasons you can survive forever off of foraged bushes. Since they reset every season you have to wait a max of 13 days to loot the bush you just looted. Making farming entirely pointless except to guarantee very niche resources.
I’m simply voicing reasons I think this idea isn’t the end of the world. Plenty of other “muh realism” changes have actually added new avenues of gameplay that I find engaging. One of the reasons I still play CDDA is because it’s such a different beast than the CDDA I was playing years ago. I think we’re right to keep in mind how new players will come into the game, but we must equally consider the people who have played this game for years and continue to play it. Stagnation is harmful in its own right, and in an open source project like this you have to let ideas be tested by the whole community. Not just the people making the PRs.
I get what you mean, but serously making a Cataclysm : Fun times ahead that keep enough “gamey” mechanics to not be a realistic grind might be a good solution
I used farming when I couldn’t get a mobile base because of crap mapgen (hacksaws are jerks). It was also relatively simple and accessible in it’s then form: fertilizer, water, whatever, do other stuff, come back.
I used it heavily for canola oil, since cooking oil was hard to come buy and used in good recipes. I used it to mass produce fruit for dehydrated food. It was a “bit” of overkill, but I enjoyed it. It was a good way to spend time while I waited out bad conditions (halfway through winter, had low skills or bad equipment for summer, read my books, etc).
Having excess food is a positive thing: I can focus on other parts of the gameplay. If people don’t like that and want to grind grind grind in one place, they could’ve reduced the success of foraging, use a mod so food’s less nutritious or drops a lot less, etc. People can already change season length. We have outside mechanisms which do nearly the exact same thing (change seasons). I don’t know if farm time can be changed by mods, but if source code and default settings need to be changed to please some users, that’s a problem.
Farming is my main concern as well. But it’s hard to say anything conclusive until I can manage to actually get a harvest.
Given that scavenging food from the wilds or animals is fairly trivial, representing only a fraction of your time in game compared to preparing food for long term storage, or other tasks such as reading & crafting, it’s very hard to argue for much survival value to farming, unless again, you’re trying to support a much larger population than 1.
That’s regardless of yields or crop times - though extending the growing seasons only makes that difference more acute, and requires a larger yield and larger settlement to absorb that yield before it makes any actual economic sense to undertake the activity vs. the current scavenging model, which can currently easily generate enough food for a large number of people. A huge crop yield would only result in the player being forced to spend several days preparing food for long term storage, far beyond what they’d ever need to survive.
As for the other aspects of longer seasons, I guess while it makes sense from a realism standpoint it will probably reduce the impact of those seasonal changes on the game by stretching them out well beyond the horizon of many sessions. They’ll come up a lot less often, and matter less when they finally arrive.
Even in the dead of winter, finding food by that point is still simple enough to be a non-issue for the most part - you’ll have high survival skill and good tools by 270 days into the game when winter arrives - so a failure to plan ahead simply will have little real impact.
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.
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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.
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Hi survivors!
We asked some questions about the change on github and Kevin answered them. The game will change… a lot. 
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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
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.
Not sure what you mean. I always play with 91 day seasons. Why would it make the game less interesting?
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.