Configuration option question

[Kincora 0]

I was watching Kittychanleys episode 1 of playing and she mentioned that she set the option to 360 days instead of 96 days for a year.  I was wondering if its possible for me to change that setting and have it be ok on my map I have been playing on.  Its my first map with a good starting area and I am learning the ropes and put some good time in but it would be nice to make the year more realistic I am just worried about corrupting the map and losing it.  Thanks for any info you can share.

 

[Kittychanley 1,002]

Changing time config options should be perfectly safe. The change is simply applied while the things that use the year length are ticking. So before the change, when a crop ticked, it was counting up to X before it would grow into the next stage. Now the crop is just counting up to Y. The only thing that I could think that might possibly cause issues is if you were decreasing  the value so that years are shorter; but making the year longer shouldn't break anything.

[Kincora 0]

Thank you for the quick reply, that is good new.  Not to be a pest but if I do switch to a 360 day year I am wondering if that changes speed of food decay or plant growth.  If so then I might starve long before any new crops have grown, guess i can just make the change and find out but if someone can tell me the difference it would be greatly appreciated.  Rather not be living on nothing but protein and cheese for months.

[Kittychanley 1,002]

Food will decay at the same rate, but crops will indeed take longer to grow, as they are based off of the year length. Any calculation that is done in months, like crop growth and baby animal growth, is going to take longer if you increase the year length.

 

So if you increase your year length, your food is going to rot away at the same speed as before, but it's going to take longer for baby animals to grow up, and for crops to grow. This is why the majority of players increase the year length; for increased difficulty in managing food, not to have a more "realistic year length."

 

Servers also often increase the year length to account for the fact that it keeps running while players online. This way, since the crops take longer to grow, players don't have to worry about logging off in summer, and then coming back the next morning to it being winter and all of their crops are dead.

[Kincora 0]

Thank you again for the info, guess I will wait til I am in the spring tome to go in and make it a longer year.

[WingedRayeth 11]

Actually, as someone who plays the 360 day year, you won't have much luck with that. If you wait until spring on the default setting, only about 75 days will have passed. If you then change the year length to 360 the game will think you are still in mid August, putting you right back into the tail end of summer. I found that out the hard way.

[Kincora 0]

So when should I change the time setting to a year then to not screw everything up?

 

 

*Update: Switched it to 360 day year with it being Jan 4th and then logged in to find that its now showing June 1st year 1000.  Sooooo is my calendar/map borked and going to require a fresh start?