How long do the droughts last?

[RiddilingIce]

Ive been playing on the plains map with foxtails/folktails (i'm too lazy to check their name right now) for a while and my longest drought was about 6 days, i read that they get longer later in the game but is there a cap to this or does it increase infinitely?

[ZakTheFallen]

It's 5-7 days for Normal difficulty, but there's also a % modifier added to how harsh the drought is. That should increase with time, but I haven't survived enough on Normal mode to give numbers on that.

You can see this if you choose Custom difficulty, since it defaults to the settings of Normal mode. Personally, I think Normal shouldn't have droughts this long, considering on Easy mode its only 1 day. Thankfully that can be tweaked with custom settings.

[zytukin]

Originally posted by ZakTheFallen:

considering on Easy mode its only 1 day.

They get longer in easy mode too, they don't stay 1 day.

[Dravkwn]

Just avoid hard mode. I've got some that last a full month and then after 3 days of wet season it goes to a drought again. Only happened a few times but YEEEEEEEESH.

[i-am-noob]

Any update on this ? I'm playing on Hard mode, haven't seen a drought longer then 25 days so far ... and I'm at a point that even that seems easy (2000+ food, 4000+ water stored and have a massive dam that keeps water in for crops + pumps for the entire drought - or most of it at least)

[CG]

Originally posted by Fancy:

Any update on this ? I'm playing on Hard mode, haven't seen a drought longer then 25 days so far ... and I'm at a point that even that seems easy (2000+ food, 4000+ water stored and have a massive dam that keeps water in for crops + pumps for the entire drought - or most of it at least)

max on hard 15 to 30 days.

seems you reached the end of early access :D try custom mode ^^

[Prometheus]

Max on Normal is 9 days. 9 days is boringly easy.

[Ch1ck3n_L0rd]

I'm on cycle 22, day 21 and on normal mode. I'm getting about 9 max, but sometimes it gives me a break and i get about 4-7 day droughts. i havent played any other maps, but im on the plains one.
at the beginning each drought seemed to go up by .3day it seemed until it maxed at 9 i think. will continue to post/edit as i get further. I've finally made a reservoir so i can survive about 6 days without my river ever running completely dry.

[Alcator]

If anyone is curious, when selecting difficulty, try looking at the CUSTOM option. It will show you ALL the parameters that are used to drive difficulty.
Specifically for Droughts, there are these factors:
Minimum Drought Duration, Maximum Drought Duration, Early cycles count, and Drought reduction during early cycles.

Normal difficulty has Min/Max at 7 and 9, it has I believe 5 early cycles, and reduction of about 40%. Which means if you are lucky and roll a 7 day drought for your first, it will get reduced to only 40% (roughly 3 days) - but with the 9 day randomly selected duration, it could be as long as 5 days.
Hard difficulty has maximum duration 30 days.
There's also the Length of a normal cycle (14-17 for Normal difficulty).

If you want, you can customize the difficulty by playing with the numbers.

The drought will never be longer than the MAXIMUM LENGTH listed there.

[Mr Noob™]

Just bought the game last week. Second game I'm playing on hard. (mountains)

I recently had a 29, 30, and 27 day drought in a row - somewhere around cycle 25 I think, with 6 normal days between each one. My dams caught *all* the water in those normal cycles, with none running off the map.

Lets just say that I was thankful to get 17 & 19 day droughts after that.

[Cheesebagz]

Ngl im on my first game an i have survived (with some difficulty) 2 9-day droughts, one of which where my floodgates were being revamped, so i feel there should be a longer max drought on normal if 9 days is the max, I've survived and i found out how to move items between districts AFTER the first drought

[Prometheus]

Originally posted by Cheesebagz:

Ngl im on my first game an i have survived (with some difficulty) 2 9-day droughts, one of which where my floodgates were being revamped, so i feel there should be a longer max drought on normal if 9 days is the max, I've survived and i found out how to move items between districts AFTER the first drought

Consider for a moment that there are two modes you can select if you want more difficult droughts than the trivially easy 9 day ones.