Sorry if this is a bit of a novel, but I just wanted to clarify the ideas here as being rooted in science.
First, I want to try covering the basics of what has been confirmed as planned. Biomes won't be static, and will change based on geography, climate, the condition of ecosystems, temperature, etc. Accordingly, there are no hard borders between biomes like one would find in most voxel games, and displacement of certain elements or wildlife can completely change a biome. Additionally, there won't be distinct biomes insofar that no two biomes will have identical characteristics. Biomes will react to seasons uniquely based on the variables at play. A hot subtropical region may experience less precipitation during winter, which may suppress some insect populations, for instance.
Biomes are defined by their baseline humidity, average temperature, level of foliage(which is related to humidity), energy levels(life electricity etc), and surrounding geography like mountains which would largely affect precipitation.
Now, I want to talk about some new potential biome elements, which would have the effect of turning our seasons on their head(in a good way, of course!).
Let's take two real world examples to introduce this one...
Greenland, and a location in
Jordan. Linked are seasonal temperature and precipitation curves for both of the regions, with the red lines in the temperature graphs representing the average high and blue lines representing the average low temperature for each month. If we add daily fluctuations to the temperature curves, it can be safely assumed that drier climates with less foliage experience higher daily temperature fluctuations.
I want to talk about daily fluctuations first, as they relate to gameplay. For the sake of an extreme example, let's look at the saharan desert for daily fluctuations. The saharan desert, as we all know, experiences almost no rainfall and has extremely sparse foliage and moisture.
Daily temperatures there can fluctuate between 37.5 to −0.5 °C, which means the sahara functions congruent with our understanding that high temperatures, low moisture, and little foliage increases subseasonal temperature fluctuations. That also means that while the days are extremely hot, the desert has very little heat retention, hence the daily fluctuations. Compare that to a tropical rainforest, which experiences very little daily temperature fluctuations. From a gameplay perspective, that means a desert is liable to give you heat stroke during the day and to cause you to freeze to death at night, while a rainforest would be reliably hot and miserable.
On to seasonal fluctuations and our prior examples, we can see a number of things happening. First, let's address temperature. I think we discussed daily fluctuations exhaustively in the last paragraph, so I'll stick to talking about seasonal fluctuations and what that means for gameplay. In Greenland, the snow doesn't melt until about April or May, and snow starts coming back around late October or early November. That means 'winter-like' conditions last between 6 to 8 months out of the year, or 46/92 days to 61/92 days of the mythrunian year, followed by a short, slightly more wet summer or warm season.
Conversely, our example in Jordan never goes below 10 degrees celsius. There is no true winter there, but we see something very interesting happening as the temperature goes up: an inverse correlation between temperature and rainfall that has a 6 to 8 month
summer and a much shorter cool season ... which seems to contradict Greenland's relationship, where their short summer saw increased rainfall. Well, fear not, physics isn't collapsing in on itself.
Jordan is east of the mediterranean and west of the arabian desert. During hot seasons and the daytime, article A in
this imagerepresents the airflow between land and sea. During cooler months and the evening, article B represents the flow of air. This is due to the sea having lower air pressure than jordan during the summer and higher air pressure during the winter. The mediterranean is west of Jordan, while the Arabian desert is to the east. During the summer, the wind is blowing to the west toward the ocean, hence the complete lack of precipitation during that time. During the winter, the wind blows in from the sea and brings with it precipitation. This happens because the sea's air pressure is fairly static, while land air pressure changes greatly depending on the season and even the time of day.
This all means, though, that with the right system in place you can accurately direct clouds and storm systems from sea to land, as well as between different biomes and such.
TL;DR form
- Instead of distinct seasons, we can use temperature and precipitation curves that are affected by the global season via a master curve of sorts.
*This means that some seasons may be longer, shorter, more severe, or not expressed at all depending on the biome.
*Temperature curves would also be present in the day/night cycle, with daily temperature variation being decreased by humidity and foliage density - dry deserts would have very low evening temps but very high day temps.
*Clouds would be less likely to form from a dry and cold biome, but would be more likely to form from a hot and wet biome.
- We can use air pressure(calculated from temperature and humidity) to help determine wind and storm system directionality.
* In biomes where there would otherwise be no distinct seasons(like a hot desert), this allows us to create organic wet and dry seasons depending on nearby bodies of water.
