Proposal: Add Weather & Seasons System

[Jasrags]

Summary
Introduce a weather and season framework that drives dynamic environmental effects—rain, snow, hail, fog, heat, chill, etc.—and allows modules to define custom seasons and weather behaviors. Outdoor areas would automatically reflect current conditions (e.g., snowy ground, puddles, reduced visibility), opening up rich gameplay and immersion opportunities.

Why This Matters

• Enhanced immersion: Weather and seasonal changes make the world feel alive and dynamic.
• Gameplay depth: Weather can affect movement speed, visibility, combat modifiers, or even unlock season-specific events.
• Content flexibility: Authors can create unique climates and season lengths for different zones or worlds.
• Extendibility: A standardized system lets modules plug in new weather types (acid rain, sandstorm) without modifying the core.

Key Features & Requirements

• Season Definitions

  • Configurable seasons (e.g., Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter) with start/end dates or lengths.
  • Custom seasons per zone or global defaults.

• Weather Types

  • Out-of-the-box support for Rain, Snow, Hail, Fog, Heatwave, etc.
  • Configurable intensity, duration, and probability profiles per season.

• Environmental Effects

  • Automatic terrain adjustments: muddy ground when raining, snow piling up, frozen lakes, etc.
  • Visibility and movement modifiers (e.g., reduced sight in fog, slower travel in deep snow).
  • Integration points for modules to react to weather events (e.g., trigger NPC behaviors, harvest seasons).

• Persistence & Timing

  • Weather state persisted per zone or globally in the game tick scheduler.
  • Configurable tick intervals for weather updates (e.g., hourly, daily).

[Jasrags]

@Volte6 this brings up a question about modules with dependencies, this proposal would have some ties into the gametime package and time module along with other systems. We should probably think on how to support that.

[Volte6]

Some thoughts/considerations:

• How does this overlap or differ from mutators?
  • Example: Forest Mist - Is zone-wide, appears at midnight and disperses at sunrise and can apply buffs while active (such as freezing cold, dehydration, etc)
• How do seasons/dates for weather work with the in-game gametime system?
• Should weather be world-wide? zone-wide? Multi-zone?

[Volte6]

@Volte6 this brings up a question about modules with dependencies, this proposal would have some ties into the gametime package and time module along with other systems. We should probably think on how to support that.

Modules can declare requirements in order to be loaded, although it's not really used anywhere currently as an example.

It looks something like:

t.plugin.Requires("time", "1.0")

[Jasrags]

Some thoughts/considerations:

• How does this overlap or differ from mutators?

  • Example: Forest Mist - Is zone-wide, appears at midnight and disperses at sunrise and can apply buffs while active (such as freezing cold, dehydration, etc)

• How do seasons/dates for weather work with the in-game gametime system?

• Should weather be world-wide? zone-wide? Multi-zone?

I’ll take a look at mutators and see where they might fit into this system. As far as the scope of the weather I would say per zone makes sense but I would not rule out a mixture of zone and world.