Rainy vs Dry Season in the Tropics

[Xefjord]

Hi all, new to Vintage Story and the Forums, this suggestion is a slight expansion off a reply I made to another thread regarding heat exhaustion that I think is interesting enough to warrant its own thread. I want Hot / Tropical climates to have more challenges, especially since I hate them IRL and don't want to just feel like playing in a warm climate is playing on easy mode. Heat exhaustion is one of the ways to tackle that, akin to freezing in cold climates, but there is already a thread for that.

An alternative (Or supplementary) idea is to keep the winter months difficult in the tropics by making winter a "Dry Season." You can have decreased spawn rates just like we do in the colder parts of the map for mobs, and most importantly, rainfall, even in rain forests, becomes increasingly rare. The level of moisture the soil keeps, even when connected to water, can also have a seasonal debuff that increases its decay rate, and lowers it default maximum moisture rate when next to adjacent water. (Ex. Normal soil stays 75% moist when next to a block of water, but in the dry months it is only 25 or 50%. You can still manually water it, but it will decrease 2x as fast in moisture back to its baseline).

If you want to somewhat attach this Dry Season to Temperate climates, you can just make the Dry Season during the summer, so it feels like some regions can deal with summertime droughts, and it can just be tied to high heat levels that cause this effect. But that is up to the developers. I just want the tropics to be more difficult, and a Dry Season feels like an easier solution to that that doesn't require a deep dive into thirst mechanics, shade, etc.

[Facethief]

I like this idea. The only thing is how to have the game dynamically change the humidity/ apply this effect. I guess it could be applied based on latitude, with distance from the equator moving the “dry season” earlier into the year, with some year-to-year variation on length and timing.

[Bruno Willis]

I'd love to see the way moisture and farmland works get a re-balance, so that crops can be over-watered, and you don't need irrigation right up against every block of farmland. In reality, too much water is as much of a problem as too little for crops, especially gardens which take a long time to dry out after a soaking. That could be part of the challenge for tropical life, trying to keep your crops from getting sodden and rotten during the rainy season (obviously things like rice would love being soaked though).