Seasonal plants and flowers: Phenology in Vintage Story

[Monkeylord]

Hi! some my suggestion is quite simple: The game has a heavy focus on seasons and seasonal changes, so why not make the plants and flowers respond to the flow of the seasons?

I'm not talking about crops or fruit trees, as maybe making berry bushes only flower and fruit one or two times and only in one season may make things too hard, but we should definitely see some changes in the plant composition of the world as seasons change: Most plants would be flowering in spring (with some of them like maybe red poppies or mustard flowers spawning only in this season), some other in the summer and in autum (like mandragora!). In winter, most flowering plants should either be dead, dormant or flowerless (with some exceptions like crocus, narcissus and helebores), and when spring starts to near let the world bloom again. Plants like ferns and horsetails would of course be mostly unaffected by the seasons, as pteridofites are flowerless, and other species would still be flowering most of the year.

I don't know if this would be a lot of work to implement or not as I am no programmer nor game designer, but I think it would be really nice and would make the world feel much more alive.

[Facethief]

This is probably possible, as I know TFC (a mod for TOBG with a similar premise to this game) did seasonal flowers. Of course, the flowers never actually die back, as that’d make the subsequent spring very laggy, but the actual blooms become invisible during colder seasons.

[LadyWYT]

I've been thinking about that lately. It seems like flowers could be tweaked so that instead of breaking the plant and getting said plant, perhaps breaking the plant yields seeds/flowers, at most, and the plants themselves actually have to be cultivated by seed.

13 hours ago, Facethief said:

Of course, the flowers never actually die back, as that’d make the subsequent spring very laggy, but the actual blooms become invisible during colder seasons.

The plants could probably despawn when it's too cold and then respawn in the same general area once the weather warms enough, similar to how mushrooms will respawn after being harvested. The bloom texture itself could probably just be set to invisible whenever the flowers have been harvested or aren't actively blooming. But I'm also not sure how feasible any of that is.

[Bruno Willis]

This would make bees less effective and more interesting to keep, as well as making the world feel more alive. I like it. 

[Monkeylord]

8 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

It seems like flowers could be tweaked so that instead of breaking the plant and getting said plant, perhaps breaking the plant yields seeds/flowers, at most, and the plants themselves actually have to be cultivated by seed.

That would be great, as it would give us the hability to cultivate something other than food crops. They don't even need to have a complex growth or nutrition system. And maybe you could use the hoe for uprooting plants and getting them whole like we do now in-game

 

8 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

The plants could probably despawn when it's too cold and then respawn in the same general area once the weather warms enough, similar to how mushrooms will respawn after being harvested. The bloom texture itself could probably just be set to invisible whenever the flowers have been harvested or aren't actively blooming. But I'm also not sure how feasible any of that is.

I thought about somethin similar, yes. Would be a good method

[BlackMoonHowling]

I feel like that could be very rewarding to cultivate a proper flower garden to maximize the effectiveness of bees to have flowers that bloom in spring, summer, and fall. Plus just decorative seasonal gardens around builds and etc.