I understand that Zomboid is designed around your death and that gameplay is not meant to be yearly (or often gets boring bc it takes hundreds of hours to get through an entire year).

However, I was curious if people were interested in a mod that would accelerate the month to month gameplay so that you can experience a multi-year playthrough and experience seasons multiple times.

• At the end of every day, the game would skip X amount of days.
  
• Example of skipping 3 days: After playing Day 1 >> fast forward to the beginning of Day 5, play Day 5 >> fast forward to the beginning of Day 9, play Day 9 >> fast forward etc.
  
• Day length ideally would be set to 2 - 3 Hour days.

Does this sound interesting as a concept?

What are some potential problems that may occur that are time based?
ie. Farming, Shutoff, Skill gains

Could a player mitigate this issue if they were to tweak time based settings: XP gain, faster farming, faster reading etc.?

Idea Inspired by this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2739115437&searchtext=shorter+month

Can't you already change time settings in the sandbox mode?

hmm how would erosion work then also what if player doesn't sleep at night

Originally posted by Praeceptor:

Can't you already change time settings in the sandbox mode?

You can adjust the day lengths to 15 and 30 minute days but many people already think 1 hour days is barely enough time to get things done.

Shortening the days would mess with the day to day gameplay loop so instead to progress time, we would fast forward (skip) between days.

EDIT: specify skipping days

Very neat idea.

You could also just start at a different time. I always start on Christmas Eve now.

Surviving an entire realistic year in PZ is a big ask, not only for the difficulty but the sheer time commitment if requires.

An interesting idea would be to use a Rimworld style calendar, which only has 4 "months" called quadrums. Decembary, Aprimay, Jugust and Septober. Essentially, each month is a different season. I know it's far from realistic, but it would allow players to experience surviving in different seasons without having to commit weeks/months of their life to the project. Of course farming, food spoilage, etc. needs to be adjusted accordingly, but I think it could work.

Originally posted by Playbahnosh:

Surviving an entire realistic year in PZ is a big ask, not only for the difficulty but the sheer time commitment if requires.

An interesting idea would be to use a Rimworld style calendar, which only has 4 "months" called quadrums. Decembary, Aprimay, Jugust and Septober. Essentially, each month is a different season. I know it's far from realistic, but it would allow players to experience surviving in different seasons without having to commit weeks/months of their life to the project. Of course farming, food spoilage, etc. needs to be adjusted accordingly, but I think it could work.

I agree, I would imagine most people play on average 2-3 months currently before taking a break. With this mod idea (and faster months mod), I think there is potential to improve the gameplay loop by adding the goal of planning for the next season and actually play long enough to experience that prep work.

Originally posted by Mr Scruff:

hmm how would erosion work then also what if player doesn't sleep at night

I haven't developed the mod as described yet but I would imagine erosion would still scale to the day set (default 100 I believe). So while getting to day 100 would be much faster depending on settings, it would still erode based on the current day and max day.

Fast Seasons would be quite cool. Have the seasonal weather change every X days (like 30 is where I'd start) so in ~4 months you get 4 seasons. Would also be interesting to try really short seasons. I assume the current world seasons triggered by specific dates?