World, Seasons & Spawns

The world runs on a turning year, confines natural hostile spawns to areas near loot structures, and makes light a consumable resource.

Seasons

The year cycles spring → summer → autumn → winter, with each season lasting 28 in-game days (a "month") — a 112-day year, one month per season. A season is a real stretch: winter is a month-long survival test you must stockpile food and fuel for, and a crop has a whole season to grow.

• Winter shifts the ambient temperature colder.

• Summer shifts it hotter.

• Spring and autumn are the mild shoulder seasons, with no temperature shift.

• Nothing breeds in winter. Animals won't breed while it's winter — the dead season stops new life just as it stops crops. So you grow a herd (and let hunted game repopulate) in spring, not the cold; breeding resumes when it breaks.

• The sky warns of a storm. A storm doesn't hit out of nowhere — while you're out under the open sky, you get a lead warning that rain (or, in winter, a blizzard) is building, so you can get under cover, your fire covered, and your drying meat in before it arrives. You can't read it from underground or under a solid roof — you have to be out where you can see the weather turn.

Season affects body temperature — see Body Temperature.

Farming with the seasons

Crop growth and survival depend on the season:

• A crop is a season's patience. Growth is paced to roughly one growing season (a plant-in-spring, harvest-by-summer investment, versus vanilla's day or two) — a field is something you tend and live around, not a fast turnaround. You pass the wait by living your days, and resting fast-forwards them. (There's no shortcut: bonemeal feeds the soil, it doesn't ripen the plant — see below.)

• Crops must be watered — or they dry out. A crop whose farmland has no water reaching it (it's gone fully dry) wilts and dies, and twice as fast in summer heat. So a field has to be irrigated — kept within reach of water (a channel, a pond, a placed source) — exactly as a real one does. Neglect the water in a hot spell and you'll lose the crop.

• Crops stop growing in winter, and frost kills them. Nothing advances until spring, and an exposed crop dies within days of winter setting in.

• Weeds and blight. Weeds encroaching from neglected soil choke a crop (and it sows more onto bare soil if you don't clear them), and there's always a small chance of blight — so even a watered, weeded field is never a guarantee. A well-tended one mostly succeeds.

• Soil wears out — rotate or rest it. Every harvest draws fertility out of the ground, and taking the same crop off the same plot over and over exhausts it fastest (monoculture). Worn-out soil grows crops slowly and eventually starves them outright. You restore it the way farmers always have:

  • Rotate your crops — following one crop with a different one is far gentler on the soil than repeating it.
  • Let a plot lie fallow — tilled ground with nothing growing on it slowly heals (fully-worn soil takes about a season of rest to recover).
  • Fertilize with bonemeal — bone meal is a real fertilizer, so working it into a tilled plot feeds the soil back up (a quick top-up instead of waiting out a fallow season). It's the payoff for a good hunt: bone from the carcass becomes fertility for the field. Note it feeds the soil — it no longer force-ripens the crop.

  So a real farm is several plots you cycle through, not one you flog forever.

• Fields sow weeds. Over time, crops scatter weeds (short grass) onto nearby soil, and accumulated weeds raise the death chance.

More on food is on Food & Eating.

Monsters only near loot structures

Natural hostile spawns are blocked unless you're within about 40 blocks of a generated structure — ruins, dungeons, mineshafts, strongholds, villages, and the like.

• In the open wilderness, natural hostile mobs do not spawn, day or night.
• Natural hostile spawns concentrate within the 40-block radius of a structure.
• This only touches natural spawns. Spawners, animal breeding, and passive wildlife are unaffected — a dungeon spawner still works, farms still breed, and animals roam normally.

Biting insects

Camp by standing water in the warmth and the bugs will find you — just as they do in real bush country.

• Where: within about 5 blocks of a real body of standing water (a pond or swamp, not a lone puddle). Away from water you're fine.
• When: active in humid wetlands and jungles at any hour, and in other warm country on warm nights. They die back in winter and leave you be while you're in the water.
• The bite: a nuisance, not a wound. The constant swatting drains your stamina, and a heavy swarm briefly leaves you weak and clumsy.
• They carry fever. Wetland insects aren't just an annoyance — they spread disease (malaria, dengue). Lingering unprotected in their worst country risks catching a fever (a bout of the sickness illness — weak, feverish, burning calories). The danger is real in the humid tropics (jungle, swamp) and much smaller on a merely warm night elsewhere. A single pass is usually fine; it's sustained exposure that gets in your blood.
• The counter — a smudge fire: stand near a lit campfire (within ~5 blocks) and the smoke keeps them off — which stops the bites and the fever with them. Since you'd usually have a fire going at night anyway, the real danger is being caught at a waterside camp without one.
• The portable counter — a bug net: weave one from string + a fibre drawstring and wear it on your head (right-click to don it) — a fine mesh veil the swarm can't reach through, so no swatting toll and no fever, anywhere, no fire needed. The catch: you wear it instead of a helmet, a real seasonal trade in buggy country.

Torches burn out

Torches are a fuel item, not an infinite light:

• Craft a torch from coal + stick, then light it at a fire source or with flint & steel.

→

- A **lit torch — placed or held — burns down over time** to a spent stub. Its remaining fuel is shown like a durability bar. - **Mining a placed torch returns its remaining fuel** (as a torch with that much life left) — no free top-up, but no waste either.

Note: the classic vanilla torch recipe is gone. The burn-down torch is the only torch.

Dropped items never despawn

Dropped items never despawn. Anything you drop or leave on the ground stays there indefinitely, rather than disappearing on the vanilla five-minute timer.