Weather

This is built now. The weather is real and running, and you can see it: a clear day is blue, a grey day is grey, fog closes the world in to a couple of hundred metres, and rain falls — real drops, standing still in the world while you walk through them. The temperature, the wind and what the sky is doing are along the top of your screen. And it costs you. Frost, wind and rain all take food out of you, which is its own chapter: Cold, Wind and Rain. Two things described below are not built yet, and they are marked where they appear: snow does not lie on the ground, and Blíða does not exist. See also Time, the Day and the Year and Norðurljós — the Northern Lights.

The weather is real

The rain falling on you happened.

Iceland's national weather service, Veðurstofa Íslands, has been measuring the weather at stations all over the country for decades — temperature, wind, gusts, rain, snow depth, cloud, three-hourly. This game reads those measurements and plays them back to you.

⬜ One thing the records know and the game does not yet show: snow lying on the ground. The depth is in the data, and the corner of your screen will tell you how deep it was — but nothing settles on the world yet. That needs a block half a metre tall, and it is being worked out.

So when a gale comes in off the sea and you have to stop what you were doing, that gale is not something we invented to make the game harder. It blew. Someone wrote it down.

Iceland has five weathers at once, and you get the one you are in

This is the part people from flat countries find hardest to believe: it can be a gale in the Vestfirðir while the east is dead calm, on the same afternoon.

So the game splits Iceland into five zones, each with one real weather station behind it:

Stand in Kópavogur and you get Reykjavík's weather. Stand in Húsavík at the same moment and you get the north's. Walk far enough and the weather changes around you — it shifts gradually as you cross between zones, rather than switching at a line.

Two honest notes. These are the five staffed weather stations Iceland still has, and they sit at lighthouses and outposts rather than in the towns — so the north and east are coastal, windier and greyer than sheltered Akureyri or Egilsstaðir really are. And the highland station is not quite in the highland; it is the coldest inland one that still has a person reading it.

Five zones is coarse on purpose. Iceland's real forecasts use many more. This is enough for the island to stop feeling like one place with one sky.

The day is twenty minutes, and its shape is Iceland's

How the clock works is its own chapter — Time, the Day and the Year. The short version: a day and night takes twenty real minutes, on a calendar of 365 days that repeats.

But the shape of the day is exactly Iceland's. The sun rises and sets when it really does, at the latitude you are standing on.

Which means the light changes enormously through the year

This is the thing people from other countries never quite believe.

In June you will barely see night. In December you will do most of your work in the dark, by firelight, and the few minutes of grey daylight are precious.

Plan around it. Midwinter is not the time to be far from home.

The year, and the year you get

The game has 365 days, and a calendar you can read — you always know the day and the month.

There is no year number, and that is deliberate. When the year ends, it starts again. Nothing gets old, nothing counts up, and you are never behind.

A new world begins on the 25th of May — late spring, plenty of light, and the growing season just starting. A fair place to begin.

But every year is a different real year

Here is the part worth understanding.

At the start of each new year, the game quietly picks one real year from the weather records and plays that year out across the whole map. The 3rd of February in the game is the weather of the 3rd of February that year. The 4th is the 4th.

You are never told which one. You just live in it.

So the weather arrives in a real order. Real fronts, real gales, real still grey weeks — not a dice roll dressed up as a season.

And Icelandic years are not the same as each other. Some summers are warm and dry and everything grows. Some are cold and wet and nothing does. Iceland has a word for the bad ones — harðindaár, hard years — and they shaped the whole history of farming here.

So a year where the hay comes in easily and the barley ripens is a year you should make the most of. The next one may not be kind.

The game draws from thirty real years — 1996 to 2025 — and shuffles them, so no year comes round again until all the others have had their turn.

(Earlier ones exist, but one of the five stations only opened in 1995, and a year missing a whole region is not a year.)

What the weather actually does to you

It is not scenery. Five things depend on it, and the first one can kill you:

🥶 Frost, wind and rain make you burn food faster. Standing out in the worst Icelandic weather empties a full food bar in about twenty minutes instead of an hour — and running out of food is the only way to die in this game. It never slows you down and it never takes the controls away; it just makes the clock hungrier. 🔴 This is the chapter to read next: Cold, Wind and Rain.

Things grow when it is warm enough, and not when it is not. Every plant has a temperature it needs before it will do anything at all. A cold spring means a late harvest. A cold summer means a poor one.

Winter feed comes from summer grass. On a real farm you cut hay while it grows and store it, and your animals eat it through the winter — a bad summer means less hay, and fewer animals kept through to spring.

⚠️ In the game today, the weather does not touch the hay yet. You cut grass with a ljár and it grows back in ten days, in any month and any weather — see The Controls. Weather deciding how much a summer gives is still to come.

Travel gets dangerous. Wind, rain and darkness are all real, all at once, and a journey that is easy in July is a different proposition in January.

The dark is genuinely dark. On a clear night with a full moon you can see well enough to work. On a moonless, overcast one you very nearly cannot — so light a hearth, or set torches around what you are building. ✅ Both are built: a torch lights about eight metres and never goes out. ⚠️ There is still nothing you can carry in your hand to light your way — a torch has to be put down. See Making Things.

A clear, moonless winter night is also the one worth stepping outside for. See [Norðurljós](/guide/survival--02-northern-lights).

And you can see the weather without reading a number. The sky takes its colour from the cloud, fog closes the world in, and at sunset the warmth gathers around where the sun went down — everything the top of your screen tells you, the sky tells you too.

Cloud decides more than the colour. It hides the stars, dims the sun and the moon, and hides the northern lights completely — see Norðurljós.

⬜ If you would rather not — not built yet

This one is still a design. It is written down here because it is decided, not because you can switch it on.

There is to be a setting called Blíða — the Icelandic word for beautiful, mild weather.

Turn it on and your world becomes the 25th of May at midday and stays there: clear, calm, bright, and safe. Nothing can freeze you and nothing will come after you.

It is meant for building. It is yours alone — the world keeps turning for everyone else, and the seasons and the crops carry on as normal.

Switch it off whenever you want the weather back.

Where all this comes from

• The weather measurements — Veðurstofa Íslands, the Icelandic Meteorological Office, published openly under a Creative Commons Attribution licence.
• When the sun rises and sets — Almanak Háskóla Íslands, the University of Iceland's almanac.
• The Icelandic climate figures behind how things grow — Veðurstofa's own long-term station records.

We did not make the numbers up, and where we could not find a real number we say so rather than inventing one.