# Turning Seasons

You log into your world, and the sky has changed.

Last time you played, late spring — soft pollen drifting through warm
sun. Today it's vivid summer blue, the fog gone, fireflies waking up
at twilight. A few sessions later, the trees still aren't physically
red, but the sky and air around them are: amber light, thickening
fog, longer shadows. Then comes winter. Pale grey-white sky. Dense
cold fog rolling in. Snow falling in a colour your weather mod has
never quite painted before.

Turning Seasons is a small atmospheric mod that rotates your Hytale
overworld through Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter automatically.

## What it does

Every 60 in-game days (about 20 hours of real playtime), the mod
cycles through all four seasons — 15 days each. Each season is split
into Early, Mid, and Late phases, so the transitions feel gradual
rather than snapping between presets. Twelve hand-tuned weather
configurations in total, one per season-phase combination, each with
its own:

- **Sky colour curve** across all 24 in-game hours
- **Sunset and sunrise palette**
- **Fog density and colour**
- **Sun brightness and tint**
- **Cloud colour and movement speed**
- **Particle system** — pollen, gold shimmer, falling leaves, snow

The result is a world that feels like a place that *has weather*
rather than a place that *displays current weather*.

## What it feels like

**Spring** opens cool grey-blue and warms toward bright. Light rain
showers, soft pollen drifting, fireflies appear by Late Spring nights.

**Summer** is the loudest season — vivid deep blue skies, almost no
fog, a faint warm gold shimmer in the air, long days, short nights.
The sun feels bigger.

**Autumn** turns golden amber, then deepens to muted grey. Orange-red
particles drift like falling leaves. The fog thickens early; sunsets
come earlier each day.

**Winter** is pale grey-white and quiet. Heavy cold fog. White
snow-like particles fall. Dim pale sun. The longest nights of the
year, with cold blue-white moonlight that takes its time fading.

Each season's third phase teases the next: late autumn already has
hints of winter cold; late winter already has the first warming
greys of early spring.

## Persistence

**Seasons resume where you left off.** When you log out mid-summer
and come back next week, you're still in summer. The mod reads
Hytale's built-in world tick (the same counter Hytale uses to
persist your day/night cycle) plus a tiny state file in your save
folder that remembers when the mod first activated and any manual
adjustments. No mid-game time travel; the seasonal clock advances
only when the game is actually running.

## Admin commands

Want to skip ahead? Or set the season to match a screenshot you're
planning?

| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
| `/season` | Shows current season, phase, day count |
| `/season set <spring\|summer\|autumn\|winter>` | Force a season immediately |
| `/season skip` | Advance to the next season |
| `/season length <days>` | Configure days per season (3–120, default 15) |
| `/season help` | List the subcommands |

Manual changes persist across logins like everything else. Set it to
Winter, log out, come back two weeks later — still Winter (unless
the natural progression has caught up).

## What it isn't

So you know exactly what you're getting:

- **Terrain colours don't change.** Hytale bakes block tints (grass,
leaves) at world generation time and doesn't expose a runtime hook
for asset packs to alter them. The seasonal effects are purely
atmospheric — sky, fog, sun, clouds, particles — and they pair
with Hytale's existing block colours rather than overriding them.
- **No custom snow particle yet.** Winter snow is simulated using a
white-tinted version of the vanilla rain particle. A dedicated
snow system would need Hytale to expose more particle authoring,
which I'll integrate when it's stable.
- **Default overworld only.** Fragment instances (Sakura Grove,
Skylands, custom dimensions from portal mods) keep their own
environments and aren't affected by Turning Seasons.

## Compatibility

- **Hytale Update 4 and later** — the mod declares wildcard
`ServerVersion`, so it stays current as Hytale ships future
updates.
- **Plays nicely with most mods** — no block changes, no worldgen
changes, no events intercepted other than the weather forcing
itself.

### One specific incompatibility worth knowing

**HAARP Weather Control** also overrides Hytale's
`setForcedWeather()`. If you run both mods, whichever one calls the
weather API last wins. Practical interaction:

- Run a `/haarp` weather program → HAARP's chosen weather displays
immediately
- Turning Seasons' next phase transition (every few in-game days)
will reassert the seasonal weather, ending HAARP's override early
- HAARP's per-program timer is unaffected — it just stops being
visible

This isn't a bug in either mod; they share the same control surface.
Most players run one or the other depending on whether they want
manual on-demand weather (HAARP) or automatic seasonal rotation
(Turning Seasons).

If you're running other mods of mine, they're designed to feel like
they belong in the same world:

- **Project Sakura** — a peaceful cherry-blossom fragment dimension
(the Grove inside stays evergreen by design)
- **Structure Atlas** — passive discovery and tracking of generated
structures across your overworld

## Installation

1. Download `TurningSeasons-v1.0.6.jar`
2. Drop it into your Hytale Mods folder
(`%APPDATA%\Hytale\UserData\Mods\` on Windows)
3. Launch Hytale, create or load a world, enable
**Turning Seasons** in the world's mod settings
4. Play. The seasons will rotate automatically.

The state file lives at `<save folder>/mods/turning_seasons/state.json`
and is created automatically on first join. Copying a save to
another machine carries the seasonal progress with it.

## Roadmap

I update this mod when I have something real to add.

**v1.1.0 — Atmospheric Variety** *(under consideration)*
- Optional zone-aware seasonal palettes (e.g., desert biomes get
different summer colours than forest biomes)
- Custom MusicContainer integration (Hytale Update 5 feature) for
seasonal ambient tracks
- Optional `/season pause` / `/season resume` admin commands

**v2.0.0 — Climate Zones** *(speculative)*
- Per-biome seasonal behaviour (some biomes resist winter, others
amplify it)
- Year length and starting season as configurable per-save settings
via a config file

## A note from the author

Turning Seasons started as a "what if Hytale had seasons?" thought
experiment, and the technical part — making a static asset system
behave like a dynamic atmospheric simulator — became the interesting
problem. If a season feels off, or if there's a specific atmospheric
moment you'd want a custom phase for, drop a comment on this page.
I read all of them.

— LordDionysus