Art Sample: Weather and Seasons (Patreon)

So promised this the other week, and now you guys get it! See, weather and seasons are something we really want to have an impact on the farming in cloud meadow, and maybe even on monster moods (but that one is up in the air).

The basic idea is that during farming, all plants need to be watered, how much water they use depends on the season they are planted in versus the season they like. Every hour, the amount of water applied to them will go down, based on the season they are in. Plants in their appropriate season use up less water. When the day turns over at 3:00am, they will automatically use up all the water they would have between 3:00am and 7:00am (or whatever the span of time is between when your character went to sleep 7:00am) and then check to see if they have the appropriate value for their plant to actually survive. Some plants are just tougher than others, they have more tolerance for too much or too little water. Other plants are very finicky, and have a much lower tolerance.

More important still, there'll be weather events that occur, like terrible storms that soak the ground, or freezing blizzards, or light drizzles that just take care of watering your plants for you, or even scorching days that utterly parch the ground. You'll be able to build upgrades like the water tower to protect your farm against such hazards, and having a high tending score or monsters with the appropriate traits assigned to your fields will help these tolerances. The water tower is the most important of these, for it can be used to keep the entire field set at exactly the right level of moisture.

Failing to have all of the plants in your field properly watered will lower the quality of all plants in that field, and more importantly, cause you to lose plants that will wither without enough water.