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!
