Were in for nasty Weather

[ImpalerWrG]

Weather was quite important for colonial people and adding a weather mechanic to the game could do several things. First it would simply add visual variety to any outdoor environment, second it could add some semi-randomization to any crafting process that take long periods of time, third it could create variation in the availability of many goods over space and time thus encouraging trade between players.

Types of weather would be fairly simple, sunny, rainy, cloudy, windy, stormy. Sunny looks like current Salem, cloudy could look and even act as mild darkness, rain is also dark and adds some 2D rain graphics in front of the camera, windy has some air-stream wiff animation also 2D and stormy is just rain and wind together both visually and in it's effect.

Each say 6-24 hours the weather changes for everyone but it dose so in a non-uniform way using perlin noise to create 'blobs' of weather that are comparable in size to existing biomes, the blobs might shift each time weather changes by use of 3D perlin noise, the granularity of weather might be very low say the size of a mini-map if it is found to be necessary to keep computations reasonable or the player finds that more manageable, but like animals weather doesn't need to exist until the player is present and any player made crafting that needs to be weather sensitive can just check very infrequently so I don't foresee much of a problem.

While all players can just see the current weather in their current location they can also use an adventure option to predict weather for their location (and maybe some surrounding locations) several cycles into the future, the prediction accuracy is determined by Frontier&Wilderness proficiency but in all cases gets less accurate in the future. The prediction is done deterministically using perlin noise and the players proficiency level so spamming it produces the same result, only a higher proficiency will yield a better result. Predicting the weather costs nothing but a little time.

Agriculture is the most obvious thing to be effected by weather, each type of weather could simply add or subtract from the 4 influences or add or subtract Upkeep, Plenty, Speed and Influence just like fertilizer. This might be good or bad depending on what the farmer wanted to raise/lower so planning around weather is important. This element of randomness will make high tier crops a bit more luck based as you will need to hit a streak of idea weather to grow them.

Foraging could also be significantly effected by weather, certain foragables only occur in certain weather, or in the case of mushrooms AFTER a certain weather (rain), the relationship can be a combination of biome and weather as well, say for example tumble weed always occurs in desert, but occurs in other terrain only during wind. Foragers who know their weather relationships and who watch and plan can more effectively find what they want.

The drying process of boards with it's rather crazy space requirement could be replaced with weather effects, the more rain and clouds the more moldy boards. Other crafting processes have potential to be simply made faster or slower, drying racks, baking tables, smokers, possibilities are nearly endless for smart players to increase efficiency by monitoring weather and adjusting when they do certain things, ideally every profession would be effected in some way but would never be shut out entirely from doing something useful.

[JohnCarver]

You sir are the winner for ideas I like lately. Unfortunately, they are also things that are not easily just squeezed into our roadmap.

Weather is something we do hope to have one day though, just another thing that is hard to prioritize over fixing existing systems.

[ImpalerWrG]

Yes I would have to agree that fixing currently broken/poor/unbalanced features of the game are higher priority and road-map shouldn't be mangled.
Consider weather and Church expansion to be wishes for the the post-beta equivalent of expansion packs.

[KruskDaMangled]

Yes I would have to agree that fixing currently broken/poor/unbalanced features of the game are higher priority and road-map shouldn't be mangled.
Consider weather and Church expansion to be wishes for the the post-beta equivalent of expansion packs.

Yeah, we could have weather effecting a lot of things. That, and seasons, which would probably change more slowly than the weather. It could either be real time, or by weeks/months. (Maybe more towards the week month, because having ALL Rabbits have a significantly higher chance to be March Hares would be troublesome all RL spring. Or having your crops be totally gimped for months at a time IRL.)

Still, little spates of it would certainly be fun. I expect tracking would be easier in winter. Unless it snowed recently, of course.

Likewise, if it was raining like crazy, scents would probably be significantly quicker to go away/wouldn't be as effective.

You might get skills which allowed you to more accurately predict changes in weather, which would let you prepare more effectively and exploit various features of certain weather.

Witchcraft might let you do localized weather, too. (Handy if you wanted some rain for your crops, or if you wanted to mess with scents. If it had an effect on guns and braziers... Well that would warrant being fairly expensive, wouldn't it?)

[DarkNacht]

Yeah, we could have weather effecting a lot of things. That, and seasons, which would probably change more slowly than the weather. It could either be real time, or by weeks/months. (Maybe more towards the week month, because having ALL Rabbits have a significantly higher chance to be March Hares would be troublesome all RL spring. Or having your crops be totally gimped for months at a time IRL.)

The problem is doing it in a way that does not discourage new players.

[ImpalerWrG]

I also like the idea of season and in the context of an existing weather system like I've proposed it is a simple matter to just change the weather mixture, more rain in spring, more sunny in summer, a nasty snow or blizzard added to the mix in winter (snow aught to really drain your biles), but they present problems that short term weather doesn't. The variations in availability of foraged and farmed items that would occur on a day-to-day and in localized scales with weather don't present any barrier to a newly started player, also thier is no over change in the server wide availability because local weather cancels out with many of little local weathers.

Seasons, and particularly Winter (obligatory 'is coming' reference here) though are going to be kind of lame if your not really cutting you off from farmed foods or adding some greater element of danger. One solution I've liked is to have the season pass as 'waves' over the map so that their are always areas in any seasons, then we just make wilderness spawning always spawn newbs to Spring time which would give them several weeks to prepare for winter. If the devs create that Newb island then it might eliminate the need to worry about the seasonal effects on new players as newb Island would presumably be in perpetual summer.

Witchcraft and weather certainly go together, given the developers intent for witches to be built around 'false positives' I'd think witches can't change thw weather, but they can trick you into thinking a different kind of weather will happen or even is happening, and then this could cause the player all kind of headaches by the normal weather effects. Combat effects are also super appropriate, guns fizze in rain, Braziers are weaker but maybe travel is slower cause of mud, scents are washed away, a dark and stormy night should feel dangerous because your more likely to be attacked by other players.

[Feone]

Balancing weather, seasons and day/night times is a tricky thing.
If it's too many downsides it'll be a continuous nuisance, if there are strong benefits then playing without the right conditions will seem a bit pointless.
Ideally it'd do a bit of both, so there is always something for everyone to do regardless.

Seasons are especially tricky due to the longer term.
Doing it in waves might help a bit but it'll still force players to play at a certain pace if they want to be ready for the more negative effects. Something that goes against the "Do whatever you want" philosophy the devs have had for the game.

A possible solution would be to keep the major effects out of the temperate (non-darkness) areas. Whereas the weather/season in the darkness gets much more extreme.
This would have to come with some balancing to make it worthwhile, maybe some types of curios or other benefits that only spawn/occur during extremes.

Adding a day/night cycle would also be interesting, doing it in waves just like the seasons proposed earlier would be a pretty good way to add something like that. Everyone could settle in an ingame "timezone" of their preference. Day and night giving different effects to the game. This day/night cycle could match up to real time too if it's not uniform across the whole map.

[DarkNacht]

A possible solution would be to keep the major effects out of the temperate (non-darkness) areas. Whereas the weather/season in the darkness gets much more extreme.

Thats a good solution, the darkness is already far to easy to live in, extreme and unpredictable weather would make it much more interesting.

[ImpalerWrG]

Moderating the effect of all kind of cyclical effects be it weather, seasons or a day/night cycle based on Longitude would be quite nice.

A higher F&W proficiency needed to accurately predict weather in the Darkness would make sense too and give us unpredictability without having to fiddle with the underlying weather generator. We generally think of the Darkness requiring higher Biles to live in but higher proficiencies make sense too, proficiency needs might apply to other aspects of Darkness as well.