Gameplay

A new game starts on the first day of spring with all fields reset to being harvested, thus simulating a farm that you have bought that hasn’t been looked after for some time. It is not possible to start at another time of year. You will have to start your game by ploughing, cultivating and seeding your fields before the plant season is over.

Nearly all aspects of the game have been changed to suit the seasons.

General activities for each season (note that this is with no GEO mod. With GEO mods, this can differ):

  • Spring - ploughing, cultivating, fertilising, sowing, spraying
  • Summer - spraying, harvesting, mowing grass and baling hay
  • Autumn - harvesting, ploughing, cultivating, fertilising, sowing, spraying
  • Winter - animal husbandry, vehicle and equipment maintenance, forestry

Winters are especially hard because you will not be able to mow any grass for your animals. All their food must come from hay bales and silage you already made. Note you will need to take care of your animals all year.

The lengths of days and nights have been adjusted to suit the seasons, so nights will be longer in the Winter than in the Summer. In Winter it might be light for only 8 hours while in Summer it is near 17 hours. The seasonal effects of sunlight is dependent on latitude, which can be changed in a GEO mod. For default Seasons, the sunlight fits southern UK.

Season Length

Each season consists of 3 transitions, referred to as early, mid or late in the game. Since there are 4 seasons in a year, there are 12 of these transitions. Because each season consists of 3 transitions, the season length can only be set to a multiple of 3 days. 3 days is the minimum season length, which would mean a transition lasting one day and a full year lasting 12 days. We have chosen 24 days as the maximum. A 24 day season length will result in each transition lasting 8 days and a full year lasting 96 days.

To change the season length, open the Seasons menu (Alt + S by default, or L1 + Options on console) and navigate to the third page where you can change the value. The settings are automatically saved.

Warnings for Gameplay

We do not officially support activating the seasons mod on an existing save game. Instead, we recommend that you start a new game. However, using an existing save game is possible and probably will work. We just will not be able to help if things go wrong. Always make a backup of your save game before activating the seasons mod. We are not responsible for corrupt save games.

If you are using a fast forward mod, keep within the below thresholds, otherwise the game will get out of sync with the extra load of seasons:

  • Do not fast forward faster than 6000x on singleplayer (preferable even slower)
  • Do not fast forward faster than 1200x on multiplayer (120x is even better)

Mod Conflicts

Note: on console, there are no scripts other than those approved directly by Giants, and players do not need to worry about conflicts. If there are issues, please report.

The Seasons mod touches almost all parts of the game. It will therefore conflict with a lot of script mods. Here is a list of types of mods that will conflict if they have not been updated specifically for Seasons:

  • Any mod that manipulates the weather, e.g. Multi overlay hud
  • Any mod that manipulates growth, e.g. SoilMod
  • Any mod that changes animals, e.g. Livestock Manager
  • Any ‘season manager’ type mods
  • Any mod that changes fruit prices, but this conflict will mostly be unnoticeable to the player

There is an issue with the game when loading multiple map mods. Always only load the mod map you are going to play on and disable all maps in the mod selection screen.

Other seasonal effects

  • Pedestrians do not spawn when it is cold outside.