Serene Seasons is a Minecraft mod that adds a full cycle of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter to the Overworld. The grass and leaves change color as the year goes on, Winter brings snow to biomes that never normally see it, and every vanilla crop only grows properly in the seasons it likes.
That last part is the one that changes how you play, as a farm that works fine in Summer can slow to a crawl once Winter arrives. This guide covers how the seasons work, which crops grow when, how to build a greenhouse that keeps them growing, and what the 
Calendar and 
Season Sensor are for.
How the Seasons Work
The year is split into four seasons, and each season is split again into Early, Mid and Late, so there are twelve sub-seasons in total. By default each sub-season lasts 8 Minecraft days, which makes a season 24 days long and a full year 96 days, or a little over 32 hours of real playtime.
A new world always starts on the first day of Early Spring, so you’ve got a whole Spring and Summer to get a farm going before the first Winter. The seasons only run in the Overworld by default, so the Nether and the End stay exactly as they are, and so do a handful of biomes like Rivers, Beaches and Oceans.
| Season | Sub-Seasons | What Changes |
|---|---|---|
| Spring | Early, Mid, Late | Snow and Ice melt away, and the potato and carrot crops grow |
| Summer | Early, Mid, Late | Snow melts fastest, and heat-loving crops like Melons and Sugar Cane grow |
| Autumn | Early, Mid, Late | Leaves turn red and orange, and Pumpkins, Beetroot and Wheat grow |
| Winter | Early, Mid, Late | Rain turns to snow in most biomes, there are no thunderstorms, and very few crops grow |
The season clock is tied to the time of day, rather than to real time, which catches a lot of people out. Sleeping through the night skips the season forward along with it, and using a command to set the time back to an earlier point will actually move the season backwards too.
Crops by Season
Every vanilla crop is given one or more seasons that it’s fertile in, and outside of those it barely grows. Hovering over a seed or a crop item shows its fertile seasons in the tooltip, which is the quickest way to check something in game, and the table below has the full list for the vanilla crops and saplings.
| Crop | Fertile Seasons |
|---|---|
| Wheat | Summer, Autumn |
| Carrots | Spring, Autumn |
| Potatoes | Spring |
| Beetroot | Autumn |
| Pumpkins | Autumn |
| Melons | Summer |
| Sweet Berries | Spring, Winter |
| Sugar Cane, Cactus, Cocoa Beans | Summer |
| Bamboo | Spring, Summer |
| Torchflower, Pitcher Plant | Summer |
| Oak Sapling, Mushrooms, Nether Wart, Glow Berries, Crimson and Warped Fungus | Year-Round |
| Birch Sapling | Spring, Autumn |
| Spruce Sapling | Spring, Autumn, Winter |
| Cherry Sapling | Spring |
| Dark Oak Sapling | Autumn |
| Jungle, Acacia and Mangrove Saplings | Summer |
| Azalea | Spring, Summer |
Out of season doesn’t mean completely dead with the default settings. An infertile crop still grows, just at about a sixth of its normal speed, so a field of 
Wheat left through Winter will creep along very slowly rather than stopping. The config can change this so crops don’t grow at all out of season, or even break when they try to.
Bone Meal is where people waste the most resources. Using it on an out of season crop only works about 1 time in 6, and the Bone Meal is used up whether it works or not, so it’s better saved for a crop that’s actually in season or one sitting under a greenhouse.
Winter is the hard season, as the only vanilla crops that grow in it are 
Sweet Berries, Spruce Saplings and the year-round list. Stock up on food during Autumn, when 
Pumpkins, 
Beetroot, 
Carrots and Wheat all grow at full speed, or getting a greenhouse built before the first snow falls.
Crops added by other mods only follow the seasons if they’ve been added to Serene Seasons’ crop tags. Anything that isn’t listed in those tags grows normally all year, which is why some modded crops seem to ignore the seasons completely while vanilla Wheat right next to them slows down.
Building a Greenhouse
A greenhouse is the main way of growing crops out of season in Serene Seasons, and it’s a lot simpler than most people expect. As long as a crop has a glass block somewhere in the 16 blocks straight above it, the crop counts as being in season all year round, so there’s no need for walls or a proper building around it.
The glass does have to be full blocks though, so 
Glass, 
Tinted Glass and all the Stained Glass colors will work. 
Glass Panes won’t work at all, and this is the reason most greenhouses seem to do nothing, as from underneath the panes look pretty much the same as the full blocks but they’re not in the mod’s greenhouse glass tag.
Lay out your Farmland
Water within four blocks, like normal
You till the ground and plant the crops the same way you normally would, with Water close by to keep the 
Farmland hydrated. The greenhouse doesn’t change anything to do with water or light, so the crops still need a light level of 9 or more, either from Torches or from daylight coming down through the glass.
Put Glass above the crops
Anywhere in the 16 blocks above
Next you’ll want to put a layer of Glass over the whole field, with a block above every column that has a crop in it. Most people put it two or three blocks up, so there’s still room to walk around underneath and harvest, but the height isn’t important as long as it’s within the 16 blocks.
Check the growth
Crops should grow at full speed
Once the Glass is in place, everything underneath will grow at full speed whatever the season is, so even a Summer crop like Melons keeps growing through the Winter. If one row seems slower than the others, look straight up from it, as one missing block or a pane in the wrong spot is enough to leave that row out of season.
Because Glass lets the daylight through, the greenhouse won’t need any lighting of its own during the day, only at night. The snow in Winter isn’t a problem under there either, as long as it can’t settle on the Farmland, so it’s a good idea to run the glass roof out a little past the edges of the field.
Underground Farms and Special Biomes
Farming underground is the other way around the seasons. Any crop below Y level 48 that can’t see the sky is fertile all year round, so a lit farm dug into the ground or built in a cave works in every season without needing any Glass at all.
A few biomes ignore the seasons completely, which makes them handy spots for a farm. Rivers, Beaches, Stony Shores, Oceans, Lush Caves, Dripstone Caves and the Deep Dark have no seasons, so crops planted in them grow normally all year. The biome is checked at the crop itself, so a field on a riverbank only counts where the River biome actually is.
| Where | Which Crops Are Fertile |
|---|---|
| Most Overworld biomes | Crops in season, plus the year-round crops |
| Under Glass (within 16 blocks above) | Everything, all year |
| Underground, below Y 48 and out of the sky | Everything, all year |
| Rivers, Beaches, Oceans, Lush and Dripstone Caves, Deep Dark | Everything, all year |
| Tropical biomes (Jungle, Desert, Savanna, Badlands, Mangrove Swamp, Mushroom Fields) | Summer crops only, all year |
| Naturally snowy biomes | Winter crops only, all year |
Tropical biomes work differently again. They don’t have Spring or Winter at all, and instead run a Wet and Dry cycle, with crops treated as if it’s always Summer. That makes a Jungle or Savanna a good place for Melons, Sugar Cane and Cocoa Beans, but a bad place for Potatoes or Beetroot, which never grow there at full speed.
Winter, Snow and Weather
Winter is when the mod is most noticeable. Any biome with a normal temperature of 0.8 or lower, which covers Plains, Forests, Taigas and most of the common biomes, gets cold enough for rain to turn to snow. Snow builds up on the ground, Water freezes over into 
Ice, and thunderstorms don’t happen at all during Winter.
Hotter biomes like Jungles, Deserts, Savannas and Badlands never get snow, as their temperature doesn’t change with the seasons. The snow and Ice that build up over Winter start melting again in Spring, and melt fastest in Summer, so by the middle of the year the world is back to normal.
Tropical biomes have their own weather instead. During the Mid Dry season it doesn’t rain in them at all, even in a Jungle, and during the Mid Wet season it rains even in Deserts and Badlands, which normally never see rain. The Dry season falls around late Summer and early Autumn, and the Wet season around late Winter and early Spring.
The Calendar
The Calendar is the item you’ll want first, as it tells you exactly where you are in the year. Hovering over it shows the current sub-season, like Mid Autumn, along with which day of it you’re on out of 8, and the picture on the item changes to match the season too.
It’s cheap to make, needing eight 
Paper around a 
Clock, so it’s worth making one as soon as you’ve got the Gold for the Clock. You can also put it in an Item Frame on a wall, where it works like a clock and shows the season to anyone walking past without needing to hover over it.
The tooltip also has a second, darker day counter out of 16, which is for the tropical Wet and Dry cycle. Inside a tropical biome the picture on the Calendar switches to that cycle too, so if you build near a Jungle it can look like it’s showing the wrong season when it’s really showing the tropical one.
The Season Sensor
The Season Sensor is a redstone block from Serene Seasons, and it works a bit like a 
Daylight Detector, except it’s for seasons rather than the time of day. It gives off a redstone signal during one season that you choose, and nothing for the rest of the year, which is what makes it useful for automating things.
To craft one, you need three Glass, two 
Nether Quartz, a Calendar and three 
Cobblestone Slabs, with the Calendar going in the middle of the grid. The Season Sensor is a low block like the Daylight Detector, so it can sit on the floor beside a redstone line without being in the way.
Right-clicking the Season Sensor changes which season it’s set to, going through Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter in turn. During the season it’s set to, the signal starts off at 1 and climbs slowly up to 15 by the end, so the strength of the signal can also tell you roughly how far through the season you are.
One simple use is a Season Sensor set to Winter, wired up to a 
Redstone Lamp above a field, so the lights only turn on once the snow comes. It’ll work with anything that takes a redstone signal though, so Pistons opening up a greenhouse roof or Hoppers that lock for one season are both easy enough to set up.
Commands and Config
If you’re an operator, the /season command lets you check and change the season. Running /season get tells you the current sub-season, the day and the exact tick, and /season set followed by a sub-season like mid_winter jumps straight to the start of it, which is handy for testing a greenhouse.
The doSeasonCycle game rule stops the seasons moving when it’s set to false, so you can lock the world into one season permanently. Running /gamerule doSeasonCycle false with the season set to Summer is a popular way of keeping the nice colors without having to deal with Winter at all.
Everything else is in two config files inside the config/sereneseasons folder. The seasons file sets how many days each sub-season lasts, which season new worlds start in, which dimensions get seasons, and whether snow and Ice form in Winter, while the fertility file controls how crops behave out of season and the underground depth that counts as always fertile.
| Setting | Default | What It Does |
|---|---|---|
| sub_season_duration | 8 | Days in each sub-season, so a season is three times this |
| starting_sub_season | 1 | Early Spring, with 0 picking a random season |
| whitelisted_dimensions | Overworld | Dimensions that have seasons at all |
| generate_snow_ice | true | Snow and Ice forming in Winter |
| out_of_season_crop_behavior | 0 | 0 grows slowly, 1 can’t grow, 2 breaks the crop |
| underground_fertility_level | 48 | Crops below this Y level with no sky are always fertile |
On a server these files live in the server’s own config folder, not on each player’s computer, so that’s the copy to edit. Shortening sub_season_duration is the setting people change most, as 8 days per sub-season can feel slow on a smaller server where players aren’t online every day.
Serene Seasons Not Working
The most common complaint is that the season never changes. That’s nearly always because the day isn’t moving, as the seasons are tied to the time of day, so a world with doDaylightCycle turned off or a mod that freezes time will stay on the same day and the same season forever.
The second thing to check is the doSeasonCycle game rule, since some modpacks turn it off to lock the season. If crops seem to ignore the seasons, they’re probably modded crops that aren’t in the mod’s crop tags, or they’re planted in a River, Beach or cave biome where the seasons don’t apply.
If the grass and leaves aren’t changing color, it’s usually a resource pack or a shader overriding the colors, or a biome from another mod that sets its own fixed colors. Swamps also change much less than other biomes by design, so a swampy area looking green in Autumn is normal and not a sign of anything broken.
Tips
Plant Potatoes and Carrots in Spring, move over to Melons, Sugar Cane and Wheat in Summer, then Pumpkins, Beetroot and Carrots again in Autumn. Following that rotation keeps a normal outdoor farm busy for three seasons out of four, and leaves Winter for a greenhouse or an underground farm.
Build the greenhouse before your first Winter rather than during it. It only needs a layer of full Glass over the field, and having it up early means your food supply doesn’t suddenly slow down at the same time the snow makes it harder to get around.
Keep a Calendar in an Item Frame near your farm and your bed. Since sleeping skips the season forward, it’s easy to lose track of how close Winter is, and one look at the Calendar tells you whether you’ve got time to fit in one more harvest.
Don’t waste Bone Meal on crops that are out of season. It fails five times out of six and is used up each time, so either wait for the right season or only use it on crops under Glass or below Y 48, where it works normally.
FAQ
Put full Glass blocks somewhere in the 16 blocks directly above each crop. Glass, Tinted Glass and Stained Glass all work, but Glass Panes don’t. Crops under the Glass then count as fertile in every season and grow at full speed all year.
Craft eight Paper around a Clock in a Crafting Table. Hovering over the Calendar shows the current sub-season and which day of it you’re on, and it can go in an Item Frame to show the season on a wall.
As an operator, use /season set followed by a sub-season, like /season set early_winter, to jump to it. /season get shows the current season, and /gamerule doSeasonCycle false stops the seasons changing altogether if you want to stay in one.
Each season is 24 Minecraft days by default, made up of three sub-seasons of 8 days each, so a full year is 96 days. The length can be changed with sub_season_duration in the config, and sleeping skips the season forward along with the night.
