Seasons
| Seasons | |
|---|---|
| Type | Mechanic |
The valley runs on four seasons of twenty-eight days each, Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter, and a save begins on the first morning of Spring. Every one of them changes what grows, what bites, what can be foraged and what the shops will sell, and the whole economy of a farm is built around that rotation. The year ticks over when Spring comes round again, and there is no limit on how many years a save can run. The calendar matters because it is a hard deadline rather than a soft one: crops that have not finished by the last night of their season are simply gone. Learning to count backwards from the twenty-eighth is the first real skill the game asks for.
Overview
Each season has a look and a sound of its own. The grass, the trees, the music and the lighting all change, and so do several villager routines, since some of them walk a different path once the weather turns. The seed racks change with them: Pierre's General Store and JojaMart both swap their stock at the start of every season, so a crop that was on the shelf last month cannot be bought this month even if the ground is free.
The change itself happens overnight between the twenty-eighth and the first. Any crop in the soil that cannot also grow in the coming season dies where it stands, which is why the last week of a season is spent planting fast crops or nothing at all. A handful of plants span two seasons and survive the change, and those are the ones worth planting early in the first of the two. Fertiliser in the ground expires at the same moment, with one exception: a tile holding a crop that carries over keeps its fertiliser, because the plant is still growing in it.
The farm also gets untidy. Tilled soil that was left empty reverts to grass, and fresh debris scatters across the map, so a few mornings go on clearing before anything can be planted. Ground that still has a plant in it is left alone, which is a quiet argument for keeping beds occupied rather than tidy. The turn from Winter into a new Spring is the roughest of the four and leaves noticeably more to clear than the others.
Several places ignore the calendar entirely. Everything indoors, everything underground, the Desert and Ginger Island keep their own conditions all year, which is why the Mines and the Skull Cavern are the standard answer to a dead Winter and why the island's crops never wilt. The Greenhouse is the farm's own exception, and restoring it is one of the most valuable rewards in the game: anything planted inside grows regardless of the month, which turns a bed of the most expensive seeds into year-round income.
Festivals pin the year in place. Each season holds two to four of them, and the town shuts down for the day while they run. They are worth planning for rather than stumbling into, because each one sells something unavailable on an ordinary day, hands out prizes for competitions, and moves friendship with the whole town at once.
Fish follow the seasons as closely as crops. Most species are tied to one or two of them, and several of the legendary fish rise in exactly one season in exactly one stretch of water, which spreads the fishing collection across a full year at minimum. Forage works the same way, with a different set of plants appearing in each season and in different places, so the same walk round the map gives a completely different basket in Fall than it did in Spring. The seasonal foraging bundles at the Community Center are built from those sets, which is one reason the Center takes a year rather than a month.
Planning a season comes down to arithmetic done on the first morning. A crop's growing time plus its regrowth cycle has to fit inside the days remaining, so a slow single-harvest crop belongs at the very start of a season and a fast one is the only sensible choice for the final week. Repeat crops reward being planted as early as possible, because every day lost at the front of the season is a whole harvest lost at the back. Crops that span two seasons break that rule in a useful way, since planting them in the earlier season doubles the window they have to work in.
Notes
The year number itself only matters in a few places. Some seeds appear on shop shelves from the second year onwards, the cooking channel on the television finishes its run of new recipes after two years and then repeats, and a few events check how many years have passed. Beyond that, a tenth-year farm plays by the same rules as a first-year one.
Winter is the season with no outdoor farming at all, and the game compensates generously. Snow covers the crops but the Mines, the Skull Cavern, the Greenhouse and the fishing spots all keep working, the forage list turns to roots and crystals dug out of the snow, and most farms use the month to build, decorate, fish, mine and work through friendship instead. Treating Winter as a planning month rather than a lost one is what separates a smooth second year from a scramble.
The opening cutscene is a known oddity. The farmer arrives in the valley when it is plainly not Winter, goes to bed, and wakes up to the first day of Spring.
All Mechanics
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
