Seasons

Every M2O server runs in one of two seasons: summer or winter. The season is part of the server’s configuration rather than something a script changes at runtime, and every player who connects sees the same one.

Configuration

Set season inside the mod object of server.json:

{
  "host": "0.0.0.0",
  "port": 27015,
  "maxplayers": 32,
  "mod": {
    "season": "winter"
  }
}

Value	Result
summer	Empire Bay as it appears in Free Ride. This is the default.
winter	Empire Bay under snow, with the matching winter environment.

If the key is absent the server runs summer. Any other value is rejected when the server starts, with an error naming the key, so a typo fails immediately instead of producing a half-applied world.

What the season affects

The season is applied before a connecting player’s world finishes loading, so it is in place from the first frame rather than being swapped in afterwards. It covers:

• the city environment, including snow cover and the matching lighting and ambience;
• vehicles, which spawn in their winter appearance when the game provides one for that model, and in their normal appearance when it does not;
• the default weather presentation for the world.

No scripting changes are needed to support either season. A game mode that never mentions the season works on both.

Seasons and weather

Weather templates belong to a season. The Weather guide lists them in separate Summer and Winter tables, and a server should only select templates from the table matching its own season.

Selecting a template from the other season produces a world that does not agree with itself — most visibly, the ground stops rendering correctly. M2O will not display such a combination: a mismatched template is replaced with the season’s default and a warning is written to the client log naming the template that was requested. Weather still works normally as long as the template comes from the right table.

// On a server configured with "season": "winter".
World.setWeather("DTFreeRideDayWinter"); // applied
World.setWeather("DTFreeRideDayRain");   // summer template, replaced by the winter default

World.setTime() and World.setRainIntensity() are unaffected by the season and behave the same in both.

Changing the season

The season is fixed for the lifetime of the server process. Edit server.json and restart the server to change it; players then connect into the new season.