Questions About Seasonal Festivals

Frostfeast, Candledark and Hearthoween are all ways that our community has produced a way for us to celebrate seasonal events with our Hearthlings. I love them and look forward every year to pulling one out. Now at last we have seasons and weather which may change the way modders might want to think about seasonal festivals.

  • Has anyone tested season specific event mods where you can load them and then wait for them to trigger during a specific time of year?
  • Can their events be limited to only one season?
  • Would allowing their events for only one season, given how short they are, even be a good idea?
  • Can we change the calendar to give longer seasons/years so people could play Hearthoween and
    Frostfeast without them running together?
  • What do you do with all those adorable costumes and outfits the rest of the year?
  • For sanity’s sake should we just think of festival mods as a fun wonderful thing that people put out to celebrate a particular real world season with their Hearthlings and they don’t really want to think about these sorts of questions because that rabbit hole is just no fun?

Would a “Seasonal Festival Base Mod” which handles some of the icky background questions be something the ACE team would want to look into in the future?

Possible features:

  • Insert [Festival] as a toggleable season so you can just select that and it’ll either run your festival mod right away or add it to your events calendar.
  • Give the player a UI that they can start or end their festival season in game as they wish.
  • Manage seasonal wardrobe changes
  • Thematic Festival terrain/weather
  • Clean up any buffs/debuffs etc that change gameplay so you can go back to your normal year after completion.

Sorry if I made anyone’s head hurt. It’s a lot and I’m probably overthinking this. Thanks for reading.

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Nah, they are long enough, specially those defaults of 3 months. The shortest seasons are the arctic spring and autumn with just one month each and the longest is its winter with 8 months.
I would guess any festival would be based on the months instead of season given their wide variable lengths based on the biome and even the risk of a season not existing at all (e.g. archipelago have different seasons)

Going off the months seem like the logical choice, and still fits with the seasons in the majority of biomes. In biomes where the seasons don’t match… well, it’s just like IRL, where the juxtaposition of festival traditions carried from the Northern hemisphere (e.g. most Christmas and Yule traditions such as roast turkey, pudding and eggnog) into the Southern hemisphere leads to, shall we say, interesting results hahah.

Now I want to see what Frostfeast looks like in the Archipelago biome… :christmas_tree::desert_island::christmas_tree:

However, it would be great if it were possible to have both options – some festivals set into the Hearth calendar, and some based on more local events. For example, a “midsummer” festival which happens based on local seasons; in some biomes it’s longer while in others it’s a brief celebration and all the more important for that briefness… while in the Archipelago biome it wouldn’t make as much sense to celebrate midsummer/summer in general since it’s basically the default season, but it might make more sense to celebrate the start and end of the monsoon season.

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Ops, you are right, having both is ideal because the same month can mean a different season elsewhere. And I’m not even considering the north/sourth hemisphere problem. A “summer” celebration would normally happen between the 4th and 6th month in the temperate, but in the arctic it would be in the second month

Everyone looking forward to prawns, pavlova, barbecue and swimsuits :merry:
…until the Frost Nation attacks. Then it’ll be all parkas and figgy pudding. :santa:

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Frostfeast wasn’t meant to be used in that way, i.e. to be turned off and on. Theoretically, it shouldn’t be impossible to allow that kind of thing, though, including some sort of “ramp up” for the temperature.

I’m not sure how this will dwell on the performance though. After all, there are lots of specific actions/overrides for Frostfeast that would need to be turned on and off, and if e.g. the AI actions cannot be removed during summer, then it could get rather nasty.

On top of that, to have a wholesome package, it would need to be packaged throughout the seasons. As an example: The warming mechanic of Frostfeast could be expanded to work throughout the seasons, and depending on the weather. In summer, they’ll produce warmth too - so you’ll either need to turn them off, or give your hearthlings some way to cool down. During (severe) rainstorms, the temperature could drop, requiring you to provide warmth again.

So point being, some of the mechanics should be core mechanics, rather than just being turned on during the season.

Excellent points there. I know I’m not great at articulating these ideas so I appreciate your input a lot.

Frostfeast is a product of its release version. It’s a stand-alone campaign, literally frozen in time at this point. We’re in a new era with seasons and weather where the world is no longer stagnant. The game is more alive and moves forward as seasons change. Things like having the player able to select Summer but then having it be always Frostfeast – goblins always having lights up, Hearthlings always wearing the silly and adorable hats etc. – would seem jarring at best. There’s so much awesome packaged there, I’d hate to lose that.

I absolutely agree that some of the mechanics should be core mechanics but that ship has sailed. It’s now in the community’s hands which is why I brought it up. I also completely understand if mod creators would throw their hands up in the air and say “Ughhh!” at having to rethink or rework the underlying systems to work with the new system. By having some sort of standardization for timed events we can keep existing modders from burning out because that work’s done for them and we encourage others to experiment with their own ideas.

I mean, when I said “core mechanic”, by no means I meant that it would be reliant on Radiant’s effort to actually make it happen. An override can get you far. A monkey patch even more so.

The only thing that stands between now and proper seasonal events is just a lot of effort. I haven’t looked into the seasonal code, so I’m not sure how they’re even doing it, but just for Frostfeast, there are a few different things to consider, too:

  • How does the goblins swap from whatever-they-are-doing to the festivity mode? Who puts up the decorations?
  • Frostfeast was meant to be “hard” on resources, so how do make food more scarce in winter? Trappers could probably just find less, and normal stuff might just regrow slower.

However, you raise quite a good point about Frostfeast being frozen in time. For some reason, I think that there should be both variants, an eternal Frostfeast, and a “Frostfeast light” as part of the seasonal cycle. There are some things that just don’t really fit well with Frostfeast being just “short”. For example, decorating your town is fun and all, but if it’s spring in two weeks again anyway, then it loses its meaning. You can’t (easily) decorate stuff and take it off again, although that could even be done as a mod (i.e. swapping decorations based on the season, probably using some hacky placeholder entity).

Standardisation is definitely the way to go, so somebody needs to provide a solid base that others can build upon. We didn’t have anything like that for Frostfeast, but that wasn’t the worst part of developing it by far.

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The arrival of Gary overrides the weather part of the seasons. He comes with his own weather (Purple with Mostly Evil) Therefore we know that we can suspend normal weather and have an eternal Frostfeast weather until the quest is completed (Always Winter, Never Spring).

Decorations with swaps would be cool and from what I’ve seen there are a couple mods that have made it work. But as long as you have the storage Hearthlings will take down decorations most of the time. (Soon to be 100% of the time, right? :pray:)
Maybe you could use the decay mechanic to make decorations decay into the iconic and fall to the ground after the quest is finished so they could be used next year. Have the windows swap to the normal windows and have the presents collected by the Church of Plenty for all those Poor Poor Orphans. Can we remove recipes? I assume we can. I wish snow wasn’t such a visual kludge.

Anyhow just ideas.

Alternative:

Someone merges Candledark + Frostfeast into “Nuclear Winter Apocalypse Survival mod”; explains why it’s stuck winter, and the zombification situation.

:stuck_out_tongue: :smirk_cat:

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