Seasonal Encounters!

So it’s winter in game right now. We’re clicking along in explore, the weather is snowing and... a butterfly lands on our lead’s nose. I usually love this encounter. It’s adorable! Butterflies on puppy noses? Priceless. But in winter? Butterflies are long gone in most biomes. After encountering the butterfly in several snowy biomes more times than I can count, I had an idea:

Why not have seasonal encounter rotations? Take the butterfly for example; butterflies are more common in spring and fall as they migrate. And in winter, in places where it snows, butterflies don’t show up at all because they’re wintering elsewhere!

There’s a lot of potential here for the majority of biomes. Most of them follow the obvious seasonal flows, but for the jungle, swamp, and desert biomes there could even be “wet” (spring and summer) and “dry” (autumn and winter) encounters!

I really feel like this would make exploring a lot more dynamic as a whole, and really help immerse players in the game! From a development standpoint this would, of course, involve writing, coding, and potentially art (as much or as little as the devs want!). Additional coding would require ensuring that Snake Quests are properly pooled for each season, so that people aren’t getting “defeat three bears” quests in winter when there would be no bears!

Potential spring encounters:

• Returning bird migrations
• The butterfly on the nose
• Flooding in the jungle and swamps
• Animal births in all biomes
• Rabbit den encounter, eat the kits or get herbs/nesting material (LittlePuppy#2787)
• Finding a bird’s nest and potentially getting eggs or attacked by the parent (casperhydes#17270)

Potential summer encounters:

• The butterfly on the nose
• Hummingbirds in northern biomes
• Dry creek bed (badweather#1805)
• Bucks shedding their velvet/finding velvet shed marks on trees (LittlePuppy#2787)
• Polar bears roaming farther south (Owlbear#6449)
• Finding a bird’s nest and potentially eating the chicks or getting attacked by the parents (casperhydes#17270)

Potential fall encounters:

• Butterfly migrations
• Bird migrations
• Fat bears!!!
• Salmon migration, help the salmon or catch the salmon (badweather#1805)
• Crunchy leaf pile (badweather#1805)
• Deer ruts (LittlePuppy#2787)
• Bison ruts in the plains
• Bodies of water full of migrating ducks/geese (LittlePuppy#2787)
• Finding an old bird nest and taking it for nesting material

Potential winter encounters:

• Female gator migrations to wetter swamplands for breeding
• Finding paw prints in the snow (badweather#1805)
• Discovering a cave/den and having the option to peek inside, perhaps finding a hibernating bear (badweather#1805)
• Increased rabbit activity during their breeding season (LittlePuppy#2787)
• Comedic antler shedding encounter (LittlePuppy#2787)
• More frequent/more aggressive coyote encounters due to food pressure (LittlePuppy#2787)
• Finding snakes as they hibernate, under logs or in rocky crevasses (Zohowler#25800)

Please feel free to suggest more! I’d love more feedback and thoughts, critiques, etc! My point of reference is from the northern US and Florida, so I would love to see more diverse suggestions from elsewhere.

I love this!  Yes please. I want bird migrations and encounters with parents defending their young and all those cool things. I love all the immersive parts of this game that reflect the natural world and it'd be great to have even more of that!

These would be so cute!! I definitely support. :D

I'm for this! Whenever I run into bears, I'm kind of like, "Shouldn't you be hibernating?!"

Such a good idea! I love these seasonal suggestions we've been seeing on the GD boards. 

I definitely support it! The raccoon already changes seasonally so I could see this just adding to it. 

ooo yes! 

For winter maybe something with pawprints in the snow?  Or maybe you find a cave where one option is to peek inside and you see a sleeping bear!

For summer, a dry creekbed maybe, with text like "hey, wasn't there water here before?" Or a heat-shimmer/mirage 

For fall,  I could see some biomes having a crunchy leaf pile encouter,  Or maybe some salmon migration encounters! Your wolf could help a salmon make its way upstream! (Choice A, help the salmon, choice B, catch the salmon) I live near a some prime salmon migration routes in the PNW so I would be super excited to see that on wolvden lmao

I can offer some ideas based off the grasslands, deciduous forest, and the riparian woodland, as I live around those types of biomes.

In the fall, most deer species go into, "rut." That's when bucks/males will fight each other for mating rights. I'd love to see explore encounters based off of that.

While wild cottontail rabbits will breed most of the year, and females lack a heat cycle, there is a lot of rabbit activity in the winter as February and March is typically when their breeding season starts. That being said, I would also alternatively think a spring encounter where your lead finds a rabbit nest full of kits (kind of like that raccoon encounter where it can give you the option of eating the kits, but instead of rummaging in stores, it can offer a different option that could possibly give you herbs or nesting material).

In places with water such as the riparian woodland, I would like something relating to bird migration in the fall. If my experience is anything to go by, freaking ducks and geese are obsessed with resting/chilling out for a day in any body of water. They come in droves, and they don't care if that waterhole is a kiddie pool, all 500-something-another will swim in it.

In the winter, coyotes become more bold and desparate due to food and pressure. Not sure how that could be implemented, but that's something to know.

In the winter, male deer will shed their antlers (they drop off of their heads). This would make for a comedic encounter, as the antlers almost never drop off at the same time.

Similarly, male deer shed their velvet (a fuzzy, skin-like covering that acts as a form of blood flow and protection to their growing antlers). In order to get this velvet off, they will rub and scrub their antlers on trees, branches, bushes, anything. Obviously, them rubbing leaves marks on the object.

There are already some seasonal encounters. For example, in autumn, one of the text-only encounters remarks "There's a chill in the air today. Winter is coming." (I think it occurs in all biomes) and there's another I think in winter about being able to see your breath.

I definitely support there being more of them, though.

I would love more seasonally driven content!

Another idea would be to have bear (and several rodent) encounters stop in the north during winter to reflect that they are hibernating (Except polar bears, which could also appear as far south as the tundra during summer to reflect the sea ice being gone? And perhaps make the quest to fight bears more rare since the south only has one bear fight I'm aware of. I'd also like to see the quest snake encounter replaced during winter in the snowy areas with a more sensible one. A magpie maybe?)

I do really like the idea of a summer salmon/steelhead run in the territories along the river where you could get non-rotting fish.