Seasons - Soil moisture

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Thelamon
Posts: 182
Joined: Thu Nov 01, 2012 8:38 am

Seasons - Soil moisture

Post by Thelamon »

Dear Seasons-Veterans,

I'm looking for a way to modify the rate at which the Seasons soil moisture value drops per in game hour.

I have played hundreds of hours using Seasons (Felsbrunn, stock GEO, 6 days seasons; Lone Oak, Midwest GEO, 6 day seasons; Geiselsberg, stock GEO, 6 day seasons and now Ravensberg Multiplayer, stock GEO, 3 day seasons.) Totalling over 1.000 h with Seasons.

Observation:
In all these games throughout many Seasons-years. I have always had significant draught damage - every single year (and often too low moisture for proper seeding in the spring - even with the stock GEO). And this was not caused by a general lack of rain, but by the extreme rate at which the Seasons-soil loses moisture.
I have had much needed rain in the morning of a Seasons day (6 day Season) only to find, that by the evening the moisture level was allready falling back to draught level. (In cool spring wheather with low wind at that.)

1. Seasons seems to be based on soils with 100% gravel content.

2. Temperarure and Wind don't seem to affect moisture loss. (Eg. even in the classic "wet months" of spring and fall with very moderate temps and wind you get dried out soil extremely quick.)

3. Winter snow doesn't appear to leave any extra soil moisture in spring as it thaws. (Which should be a significant addition. Creatring rather too wet than to dry spring soils in many northern US/CAN and European regions, making tillage an important means of geting a dry enough seed-bed in many areas.)

Stop gab fix
Seeing draught year after draught year - and feeling as if I was farming in the desert instead of temperate Southern Germany/ Austria.
I eventually resorted to manually raise the soil-moisture level in the respective save games seasons.xml.
Upping the soilWaterContent values whenever things got to silly (And adding spring-thaw soil moisture at the beginning of Spring):

Example:
soilWaterContent>0.080160</soilWaterContent

Note: The example value from the saves seasons.xml shows 8% soil moisture, indicating that your crop will get hurt. (The critical soil moisture level being 10% with everything below getting your crop hurt. IIRC)

Manually tinkering with the saves is however really counter-immersive and takes away much of the realism-magic, as of course the randomness of the wheather is an importand part of a farmers life.

Solution:
From all I can see halving the general speed of soil moisture loss (per in game hour), would fix much of the draught problem and create a much more realistic experience.
I simply wouldn't now which file (and param) of the Seasons mod I would need to edit in order to achiever this. :confusednew:
Your help would be much appreciated!

Best regards
Thelamon

PS
Realismus Modding used to have a quite realistic approach to this in the FS 17 version of Seasons

https://www.realismusmodding.com/blog/2 ... tness.html

However in FS19 we see soil moisture constantly falling below 10% at all times of the year. (And plunging back down after rain way too quick.)