Another concept thread! Note that there is not a large quantity of New And Shiny in here, but this topic struck me as important enough to write it down somewhere and discuss upon.
This time, I want to tackle the topic of seasons and climate change during the game, and how it could affect the gameplay.

Let's establish some basic understanding for ingame time first: Clonk has some sort of time-distortion (always had). Trees grow in a matter of minutes, animals grow to full even faster, seas freeze over and melt again while I finish my research on gunpowder, but only half a clonk-day passed by. That's okay really, because usually, nothing of that is in the center of my focus. It's not realistic, but we can't have trees take 50 real time years to grow big enough to make a catapult of out them.

We might want to keep check on consistency between seasons and day/nighttime, though. It might be weird to have a year pass by before even half a day passes by - at least if we want to give the impression that clonks live on a planet somewhat resembling our earth.

The really nice thing about Clonk is that every scenario might apply different scales on those seasons or even ignore them completely. There are tropical islands which always have summer, some RPG which uses day and night only along a narrative, some cave where its mostly dark and cold, you name it. So note: If we tie (even important) factors of gameplay to seasons, weather or daytime, this will never really bother scenario designers, since they aren't forced to stick to some standard time-rhythm. On the other hand, we give them a tool to challenge the player without dropping unfair events on them. Seasons, as well as day and night, are cyclic: No suprise in summer coming after spring.

Speaking of unfair events - we have those, sometimes; The disasters. They were in the weather-tab as far as I remember, so I'll lose a few words of disapproval. Disasters were seldom used in an appropriate way. You could defend against meteorites by building some bridge with concrete on top over the whole map, but that's just if you wanted to play for 6 hours anyways. Lightning had a trade-off in which it could power magic towers, but you couldn't always build these. Also it could strike from a clear sky at any season. Volcanos: Ugh. All of these might provide short-lived hectic fun in melee scenarios, as they can tip situations around in ways that border on the comical. An otherwise more skilled player could be defeated because of "bad luck" with a stray meteorite in a skylands fight or something. I'm not saying that these kind of scenarios are "bad" or "unfair" - but that "otherwise skilled player" surely will, because the situation was out of his control completely. Same with single-player scenarios: No fun in watching 8 Windmills and all of your 31 time-honoured trees burn to the ground in 8 seconds because of that one lightning bolt that somehow branched across the whole screen. You can't reasonably control or prepare against some randomgenerator deciding to spit out the number "screw you and all your efforts". So: Let's try keep these situations out of the "serious game", someone (Timi?) will make enough scenarios purely relying on those mechanics sure enough.

On to examples of things which don't put the player before a heap of broken glass. Most of them do not exist yet. It's also more of an collection of ideas from here, meant to show off a few possibilities.

Day & Night:
Starting with this one because it's most likely the smallest unit of time.
Animals: Some sleep at night, like wipfs or birds, some come out only then, like some mean predators and fireflies.
Light: Well, this is mostly Peters territory, so maybe he could chime in on that. We had talked before, and there were thoughts of making a players sight entirely dependent on light. So at night, you can't see. Well, except for where you put that giant steam-engine driven search light, maybe. It's a pretty bold limitation there, but the more I think about it, the more I like it.

Seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.
Landscape: Seasons affect temperature, and that in turn freezes water or melts ice. And maybe it's so cold that even the ground freezes, only the silliest farmer would try to plant his wheat now.
Farming: The harvest will prove much poorer in the wrong months. Better to do it in autumn.
Vegetation: In Winter, plants grow slower and won't bloom (so, no fruits).
Animals: Wipfs burrow into the earth for hibernation. In spring, though, they'll build a nest and procreate. Birds will leave during the winter months. Hot summers come with an increased zap population.
General: Winters days are darker and shorter. The more night you have, the more stuff can be done unnoticed by the enemy.

Weather:
It's the same as in the real world: rainy mild springs, rainy hot summers, rainy stormy autumns, rainy rainy winters.
A long dry spell in the summer could endanger your crop, maybe it's time to think about some artificial water supply. Stormy autumns will prove perfect for your wind energy farm. You did install those lighting arresters, of course. You could also try an air ballon rush to your enemy base once the wind is right. Heavy rain might extinguish your torches, and under those thick clouds the night is even darker than before. Lightning - We can keep that one if if's not as annoying. As it's announced by a purple skies and growling thunder, you won't be caught off guard entirely. Also it could maybe just short-circuit some hit building for a short time instead of destroying it, and split trees instead of setting them on fire.

Ambience: There's a lot that can be done with sound and visual effects here. I really think that something as plausible and natural as seasons, day and night, weather and climate can help tie the game together an incredible amount. We certainly don't need some text jumping into your face at the beginning of a scenario telling you that it's summer (Yes there are games that do that). You can see that, the sun is high, everything is bright, there's fruit and foodstuff, there are these froglike things at the pond and also butterflys. As soon as the sun starts to set, the forest will be populated by chirping glowing bugs. (Maybe you should catch them and craft some lantern from them). Same goes for the other seasons and the other "forces" - since their effect and their appearance is so very known to the player, all the stuff happening around them is self-explainatory. This is strongly tied to the aesthetics task force.

So I think giving the forces of nature more significance is a smart thing to do. With the right amount of attention, this feature could enrich and polish the game experience at the same time.