Non-Trivial Winters

[SohlKuhtal]

Hello, all!

My wife and I absolutely love this game. It hits such a great balance between survivalcraft, cozy homesteading, and creativity, and we've been looking for something like this for years.

That being said, after many happy hours of gameplay, our interest has started to diminish for one main reason:

The survival / food accumulation / homesteading side of the game starts to become a little redundant after the first winter or two.

A huge part of the primal satisfaction and coziness of the early game comes from preparing for winter #1: gathering enough food, preserving it, making warm clothes, improving your shelter, stocking firewood, and generally making sure you're actually ready to survive.

But once we had a decent farming setup and food storage system, winter #2 already felt fairly trivial. We had solved the problem, and there wasn't much pressure to keep expanding or improving those systems.

So, here's our suggestion for the lovely developers — or maybe for modders out there:

An *optional* setting for much harsher winter periods.

Think:

- Multi-day blizzards and extreme cold, making outdoor movement extremely difficult even with good clothing
- Periods where hunting, farming, travel, and gathering become extremely impractical
- Actually having to rely heavily on preserved food for extended stretches, keeping farming and preservation relevant well beyond winter #1
- Possibly prolonged periods of darkness during extreme weather
- A greater need for warm shelter, fuel, lighting, and preparation
- Battening down the hatches, keeping the hearth burning, listening to the wind howl outside, and working on indoor projects while waiting for the storm to pass

Importantly, I don't think winter would need to be brutally difficult *all the time*. Occasional extreme cold snaps or major storms would probably be enough.

The goal would be to make preparation continue to matter.

It would give you a reason to build larger food reserves, improve your cellar, expand your farms, stockpile firewood, make better winter clothing, and generally maintain that wonderful feeling of preparing your homestead against the wilderness.

For us, something like this would help keep food preparation, preserving, cold cellars, farming, warm shelter, and winter readiness meaningful for many more in-game years instead of largely being "solved" after the first winter.

*P.S. By the way, yes — we do already have Harsh Winters turned on, and we've also adjusted the cold sensitivity setting to make cold more dangerous. Even with those settings, we still find that once the basic survival systems are established, later winters become pretty much trivial.

Thanks for reading!

 

[LadyWYT]

Welcome to the forums! There is a mod for that...well, kind of. It still seems to be heavily in the testing phase, and may not be something you want to add to a beloved world at the moment: https://mods.vintagestory.at/tasshardcorewinter

5 hours ago, SohlKuhtal said:

A huge part of the primal satisfaction and coziness of the early game comes from preparing for winter #1: gathering enough food, preserving it, making warm clothes, improving your shelter, stocking firewood, and generally making sure you're actually ready to survive.

But once we had a decent farming setup and food storage system, winter #2 already felt fairly trivial. We had solved the problem, and there wasn't much pressure to keep expanding or improving those systems.

Here's the thing though...I'm not sure adding a "harder" winter really solves the "problem", as much as it does just create the other problem of too much pressure being loaded into the front of the game, to the extent that newer/less skilled players struggle to the point of not having fun anymore. Yes, you did mention making the extra difficulty optional, however, depending on what's being added that may or may not actually be possible to do depending on how intertwined the new feature is with other game systems. There's also the matter of it not really being ideal to allow the player to turn off all difficulty(outside of mods and creative mode), or otherwise clutter the settings with a lot of extraneous things.

 

5 hours ago, SohlKuhtal said:

- Multi-day blizzards and extreme cold, making outdoor movement extremely difficult even with good clothing

Blizzards would be interesting as a rare winter hazard, but I don't think they should occur too frequently, and the limited visibility should be what affects player movement. Very windy days in general should also have a greater affect on the player's ability to stay warm, and not just blizzards.

 

5 hours ago, SohlKuhtal said:

- Periods where hunting, farming, travel, and gathering become extremely impractical

This is basically winter already though. Farming isn't really possible, hunting is scarcer, and gathering almost nonexistent since nothing is growing. Early spring is somewhat similar, since it takes time for plants to grow back and yield harvests. However, it's worth noting that while it's a fairly easy challenge to account for if the player is thinking ahead, it's one that can turn nasty quite easily if the player dawdles and fails to plan appropriately. There's been several tales on the forums of players, usually newer ones, who didn't do enough planning and had to spend most of their winter hunting whatever wildlife was still hanging around.

Incidentally, one thing that does need fixing, is berry bushes having berries in the dead of winter, if they are in freshly generated chunks. Hunting should still be a viable option, since it's not very realistic to have no wildlife at all, and the player needs some sort of option to eek out a living if they failed to store enough food otherwise.

5 hours ago, SohlKuhtal said:

- Actually having to rely heavily on preserved food for extended stretches, keeping farming and preservation relevant well beyond winter #1

Like I said above, this is already a feature of the current winters, and a challenge that's fairly easy to account for but will hurt if you fail to respect it. Do keep in mind too that if the player has to spend their entire summer/fall scraping together enough supplies just to get them through the winter, they're not going to have the time to go off on adventures to find resources or complete story content.

 

5 hours ago, SohlKuhtal said:

- Possibly prolonged periods of darkness during extreme weather

Also already a feature--the amount of daylight available depends on the player's latitude and the current time of year. Winter days are much shorter than summer ones.

 

5 hours ago, SohlKuhtal said:

A greater need for warm shelter, fuel, lighting, and preparation

Requires a rework of the temperature system, as well as changing how insulated rooms are actually calculated. Which on the latter, I'm not sure that's a very good idea.

 

5 hours ago, SohlKuhtal said:

It would give you a reason to build larger food reserves, improve your cellar, expand your farms, stockpile firewood, make better winter clothing, and generally maintain that wonderful feeling of preparing your homestead against the wilderness.

For us, something like this would help keep food preparation, preserving, cold cellars, farming, warm shelter, and winter readiness meaningful for many more in-game years instead of largely being "solved" after the first winter.

Ultimately, I think the better option to add more difficulty to winter prep, is to make crops/foraged foodstuffs properly seasonal, so that the player needs to harvest specific stuff at specific times of year. Miss a harvest window, and you don't get that particular food item for that year. Miss too many harvest windows, and you'll be spending most of your time scrounging around for food during the winter, instead of other stuff you might want to do more.

Likewise, a status effect system would introduce potential sickness and other ill effects that may result from too much cold exposure. Right now, getting cold isn't really a big deal, because it's very easy to just warm back up and heal any damage sustained with bandages, let alone the fact that it takes quite a while to actually freeze to death. However, status effects from cold exposure might require more time to actually clear, or perhaps might require special medical attention in order to properly heal.

Overall, I don't disagree that winters could stand to be a little tougher--they certainly could. But I don't think what's been proposed in the initial post really provides a long-term solution and good engagement, as much as it does just make the current mechanic take more time and be more frustrating.

[MKMoose]

8 hours ago, SohlKuhtal said:

- Multi-day blizzards and extreme cold, making outdoor movement extremely difficult even with good clothing
- Periods where hunting, farming, travel, and gathering become extremely impractical

I would be careful about this. A lot of people already dislike temporal storms because they are a somewhat arbitrary "you can't do much of anything for some ten minutes now" - adding blizzards or similar features which last several in-game days (with one day being by default 48 real-life minutes), on top of winters already restricting what the player can do somewhat, could be quite demotivating. Not that it can't be done well, and certainly may work just fine as an optional difficulty option, but it would be strongly advisable to somehow make sure that it feels natural and engaging, not just something which is there to make everything inconvenient.

I think what should be emphasized here is that merely making the player stay indoors could be kind of miserable, but it would be more enjoyable if the player is given more to do during winter - then not being able travel as freely could be a switch-up more than just a restriction (though I will also mention that realistically, travel and transport can be easier in certain aspects in winter due to lakes and muddy ground becoming frozen). This could involve any of a huge selection of mechanics, for example:

• Threshing and generally more complex grain processing - especially if grain harvests are made seasonal, this could be a very nice feature.
• Metalworking, toolmaking, woodworking, weaving - many players already do more forging in winter, so simply adding more related or similar mechanics, ideally in a way which allows the player to conveniently stock up (i.e. restricted by time investment more than resource availability), could give players more interesting things to do in winter.

 

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

8 hours ago, SohlKuhtal said:

- Actually having to rely heavily on preserved food for extended stretches, keeping farming and preservation relevant well beyond winter #1

Like I said above, this is already a feature of the current winters, and a challenge that's fairly easy to account for but will hurt if you fail to respect it. Do keep in mind too that if the player has to spend their entire summer/fall scraping together enough supplies just to get them through the winter, they're not going to have the time to go off on adventures to find resources or complete story content.

I don't really see this as a meaningful feature. Plus, if the player has to "spend their entire summer/fall scraping together enough supplies just to get them through the winter", then the problem is that food takes too much effort, not that they have to rely on food preservation.

I personally think that there are two main problems in the vanilla game, assuming standard world configuration:

• Cellars - They easily extend the spoilage time of many foods in every nutritional category to well beyond the time needed to acquire more of that food, which largely trivializes food preservation.
• Meals and pies - Nearly every food in the game can be preserved by making it into a meal or pie for an additional ~4-8 days by default (~15-30 days in a cellar), potentially much longer when temperatures fall below 5 °C. Meals made at the beginning of winter can last for most of winter and into spring.

These two factors make it so that:

• There is very little urgency when processing food - even things like red meat last several days in a cellar (and are generally obtained in small portions which makes processing easier).
• Food with short spoilage time kind of doesn't exist - meals or pies stored in a cellar extend everything by at least about two months.
• Many foods don't need to be preserved at all besides putting them in a cellar - e.g. vegetables and several fruit species last well over a year, not to mention grains and legumes which can potentially last over a year even without a cellar.

Combine this with many preservation methods being very inefficient and mostly delegated to vanity - of which the biggest offender has always been alcohol, e.g. making wine reduces the effective satiety of standard 80-satiety fruit by more than 98% relative to fruit used in a meal if I did the math right - and you have a system which provides a number of methods to preserve food but does little to actually incentivize the player to use them.

Some of that is desirable to keep the game more casual and reduce the constant pressure on the player, but just for the purpose of incentivizing more variety it would be useful to make unprocessed food less ubiquitous, and allow more preservation methods to be closer to lossless so that people actually want to use them.

 

At the same time, I think there is an important other point here: winter can favor certain food sources of its own, instead of just restricting any and all food sources, which can provide plenty of variety and perceived challenge even if the actual difficulty remains similar. I would point to three broad ideas in particular:

• Fishing, marine mammals - especially in the subarctic regions, this was historically important to subsistence during winter in many cultures.
• Hunting - animals may behave differently, snow can make tracking easier, cold temperatures slow down spoilage making carcass handling easier, animals tend to have more fat (at least around autumn and start of winter) and higher-quality fur.
• Brewing and potentially some other food processing - cold temperatures help with spoilage, which is why brewing was concentrated in the colder seasons in some regions.

 

8 hours ago, SohlKuhtal said:

- A greater need for warm shelter, fuel, lighting, and preparation

Personally, I would be interested to play around with improved sleeping mechanics as well as more limited lighting, to add more tension at night and make light more valuable but also allow to sleep through the night more conveniently to compensate. It is kind of an immersion-breaker that I can do pretty much whatever I feel like at night and almost never have to significantly worry about light except as protection from monster spawns.

Edited October 11 by MKMoose

[Professor Dragon]

I'd just like to note that sand storms in desert regions already SEVERELY curtail what you can do. 
Not being able to see more than a few blocks disables MOST of the above ground game, even building.

It's a relief to be able to walk out of a desert. That, and they tend to not last too long.

[Tam Hawkins]

SohlKuhtal if you go farther north winter will be longer and colder, daylight will be more affected by the time of the year and growing times will be cut down. The opposite happens when going south (For both of these until you hit Equators/poles).

Would going farther north not address most of your wishes for harsher winters?

 

On 10/11/2026 at 4:27 PM, LadyWYT said:

....

Ultimately, I think the better option to add more difficulty to winter prep, is to make crops/foraged foodstuffs properly seasonal, so that the player needs to harvest specific stuff at specific times of year. Miss a harvest window, and you don't get that particular food item for that year. Miss too many harvest windows, and you'll be spending most of your time scrounging around for food during the winter, instead of other stuff you might want to do more.

.....

I think that would be too big of a problem for online servers as players do not necessarily know what month the server is in without logging on to check. Even TOPS which should almost always have 1-2 players has little discrepancys in what time you calculate and what time the server actually is on because sometimes no body is on and the server stops.

[MKMoose]

2 hours ago, Tam Hawkins said:

I think [properly seasonal crops/forage] would be too big of a problem for online servers as players do not necessarily know what month the server is in without logging on to check.

And how is this meaninfgully worse than the current system? Log on a little bit too late, and oh no, the trees are all dormant and the crops have all died.

There is a million ways to make seasonal harvests work just fine on multiplayer servers.

• Increase the length of the harvest windows.
• Make plants decay slowly to make slightly missing a harvest window less punishing.
• Introduce many different plants with separate harvest windows, so that the combined harvest season is much longer than individual windows.
• Increase the yield from individual harvests and emphasize the effort that goes into processing which can be done at any time of year (this I think is the most noteworthy idea, because it allows to get a large supply at different times of year and instead places the challenge on processing).
• Ensure that at least some food sources which permit inefficient but accessible subsistence are available at any time of year.
• Introduce highly efficient food sources available in winter, allowing the player to survive the cold months with either preparation or adaptation.

Incompatibility with multiplayer playstyles is a problem conditional on seasonal growth being poorly implemented and is regardless entirely fixable. Not to mention how cool and immersive seasonal growth could be if done well.

(Sorry if I got too annoyed, but I genuinely think that seasonal growth would be one of the best features which could be added to the game, and I prefer to find ways to make it work over pointing out why it might not work.)

Edited October 14 by MKMoose

[Mac Mcleod]

You can simulate this voluntarily by starting further north.   You will get harsher winters and shorter summers (and eventually no summer).

[LadyWYT]

3 hours ago, Tam Hawkins said:

I think that would be too big of a problem for online servers as players do not necessarily know what month the server is in without logging on to check. Even TOPS which should almost always have 1-2 players has little discrepancys in what time you calculate and what time the server actually is on because sometimes no body is on and the server stops.

I think it would only be a problem for large servers where time is always passing due to there being players active at all hours, and even then I think it's still more of an issue for the players on those servers that don't play all that often and want to do everything themselves rather than work with a group. While it's unfortunate, it's one of the drawbacks to trying to run that kind of server for a game like Vintage Story, and I don't think there's really any fixing that particular problem outside of installing mods to account for unique server conditions.

One thing that would help is enabling a server option to stop food from rotting in player inventories while they're offline, and prevent rot from occurring in a player claim while all claim owners are offline. It doesn't solve the food issue entirely, since the player still needs to play regularly enough to prepare supplies and whatnot, but it does do a decent job of tackling the issue while still letting VS be VS.

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

Incompatibility with multiplayer playstyles is a problem conditional on seasonal growth being poorly implemented and is regardless entirely fixable. Not to mention how cool and immersive seasonal growth could be if done well.

(Sorry if I got too annoyed, but I genuinely think that seasonal growth would be one of the best features which could be added to the game, and I prefer to find ways to make it work over pointing out why it might not work.)

My general thoughts as well, though I would say that incompatibility with certain multiplayer styles doesn't necessarily suggest poorly designed mechanics. For Vintage Story itself, the game is balanced mainly around singleplayer and small multiplayer groups(usually friends); big servers are certainly possible, but they take more work to maintain and are more of a time investment to play on than large servers for other types of games.

[Tam Hawkins]

54 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

And how is this meaninfgully worse than the current system? Log on a little bit too late, and oh no, the trees are all dormant and the crops have all died.

....

Do crops actually die if left unharvested? I have only recently started playing online but I do have an entire field of crops that is almost a year old (on TOPS) and the only time plants died was because a rabbit got inot the field (no idea why).

The reason why I do not like the idea is that i do not think players should be forced to play on certain days/times. We currently have that already with fruit trees, but fruit trees are just one source of nutrition and they are also kinda plant and forgett.

With crops you would need to plant them and already know exactly which time to be back on or otherwise you lose your harvest. Which is probably most of your nutrition.

 

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

(Sorry if I got too annoyed, but I genuinely think that seasonal growth would be one of the best features which could be added to the game, and I prefer to find ways to make it work over pointing out why it might not work.)

I agree with you on that (and you are not sounding annoying or annoyed you just have a different optinion), seasonal work is theorethically a cool idea but we also need to point out possible problems otherwise we run straigth into them.

 

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

There is a million ways to make seasonal harvests work just fine on multiplayer servers.

• Increase the length of the harvest windows.
• Make plants decay slowly to make slightly missing a harvest window less punishing.
• Introduce many different plants with separate harvest windows, so that the combined harvest season is much longer than individual windows.
• Increase the yield from individual harvests and emphasize the effort that goes into processing which can be done at any time of year (this I think is the most noteworthy idea, because it allows to get a large supply at different times of year and instead places the challenge on processing).
• Ensure that at least some food sources which permit inefficient but accessible subsistence are available at any time of year.
• Introduce highly efficient food sources available in winter, allowing the player to survive the cold months with either preparation or adaptation.

Incompatibility with multiplayer playstyles is a problem conditional on seasonal growth being poorly implemented and is regardless entirely fixable. Not to mention how cool and immersive seasonal growth could be if done well.

I like your Ideas, I think they are good. Processing and preservation should (in my eyes) definitly play a bigger role in VS. Oftentime I do not preserve at all because simply storing things in a cellar and a storage vessel is all that is needed.

But I do still think that giving players timed events that are necessary for survival on an unknown timescale is a bad gamemechanic. On normal settings 9 days per months and if a server runs 24h/d because one guy just does not log off a player that plays every day can still miss 3 months between play sessions. And I just think a) players not knowing what time it is on the server without logging in + b) A single missed harvest leaving them with no food for half a year.

Maybe your idea of longer harvest time + slow decay after + seperate harvest windows depending on plant + more processing (resulting in longer storage times?), would aleviate the issue enough. I am just not sure. On a single player world I would love this though.

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Tam Hawkins said:

Do crops actually die if left unharvested?

To my knowledge, unharvested crops only die if the weather gets too hot/cold for too long. But even then, you should still be able to get at least a partial harvest despite the crops being dead. Fruit and berry bushes are different though--if you miss the harvest window on those, you just don't get a harvest. Berry bushes can't die from exposure(at least not currently), but fruit trees can die if it gets too cold.

 

1 hour ago, Tam Hawkins said:

The reason why I do not like the idea is that i do not think players should be forced to play on certain days/times.

I don't think this would really be that much of an issue with seasonal crops, at least not more than it is already. Properly seasonal crops should have enough variety that there's crops all year round, with some perhaps being a little more flexible on when you can expect to plant/harvest. In this case, the player is going to be pushed to vary which crops they grow, rather than just stick to the "best" crop in every category, and those goes for singleplayer and smaller servers as well as large ones. If the player misses a crop's season, it's not going to sink them, as much as it will mean they just don't get that crop for that growing season(ie, if you miss the window for blackberries because you were busy with other things, you still have a chance at other fruits but just don't have blackberries for that year).

 

1 hour ago, Tam Hawkins said:

On normal settings 9 days per months and if a server runs 24h/d because one guy just does not log off a player that plays every day can still miss 3 months between play sessions.

Sure, if the server is still using default settings. But I question why they would do such, if the playerbase is very big or playing at all hours. Don't many servers extend the month length and slow down hunger/spoilage rates in order to better balance the gameplay specifically for a larger playerbase?

 

1 hour ago, Tam Hawkins said:

And I just think a) players not knowing what time it is on the server without logging in + b) A single missed harvest leaving them with no food for half a year.

The time thing could be alleviated by allowing such information to be displayed in the server's information in the Multiplayer tab. That way players don't have to log in to the server to check the time, as much as they just need to boot the game real quick and check.

Regarding the second point, I'm pretty sure this is why a lot of bigger servers tend to slow down hunger and spoilage rates. Additionally, this is also why players really ought to vary their crops more, especially if more seasonal mechanics are implemented, in addition to investing in livestock and bees. Honey doesn't expire, and livestock don't need to be fed save to breed or fatten them; goats and sheep can eat hay, which is easily stockpiled and has no expiration date. Aside from that, having a wide variety of crops helps ensure that there's almost always something to be harvested as long as the weather is nice, and if someone gets really unlucky there's probably other players with extra crops willing to share as long as the player needing assistance is in good standing with the server community. There's also the option of settling in the warmer climates, where the growing season is year-round and it's safe to leave crops in the fields.

[Facethief]

On 10/14/2026 at 12:37 PM, LadyWYT said:

To my knowledge, unharvested crops only die if the weather gets too hot/cold for too long. But even then, you should still be able to get at least a partial harvest despite the crops being dead. Fruit and berry bushes are different though--if you miss the harvest window on those, you just don't get a harvest. Berry bushes can't die from exposure(at least not currently), but fruit trees can die if it gets too cold.

Don’t forget salt water. Although that’s only a real problem if you have friends salting your irrigation water.