The Problem

I'm sure we can all agree that Seasons of Skyrim is an incredible mod. Seasons are cool and distinct and put a fresh spin on good old Skyrim landscapes that is downright delightful. However ... the changes last for half an eternity, 90 ingame days to be precise.

Let's do the maths (and hope I did them correctly because I was always that kid with the mildly confused expression in calculus).

20 ingame minutes = 1 realworld minute
1 ingame hour = 3 realworld minutes
1 ingame day = 72 realworld minutes
1 ingame month = 2,160 realworld minutes = 36h
3 ingame months = 6,480 realworld minutes = 108h
Yes, I realise this doesn't account for every other month's 31st day. You gotta draw a line somewhere.

So assuming you never wait or sleep or fast travel, a full season would last ~108h of gameplay. Now the vast majority of players does wait or sleep or fast travel, or does all three. Nevertheless, in my current playthrough I made it all the way to November 23 in 90h of gameplay (the game starts on August 17); that is with frequent sleeping and waiting, and occasional fasttravelling. I would have seen a few hours of summer, and a whole lot of autumn. My chances of making it to spring or, god forbid, summer at this pace are slim.


The "Solution"

I'm putting the "solution" in quotation marks because it's kinda hacky, but it also definitely works! You have been warned.

In order to shorten the seasons from ~90 days/~108h to ~30 days/~36h I am tricking the game in multiple ways:

• The months were renamed to Summer/Autumn/Winter/Spring via a plugin.
• The ingame clock was modified using a custom INI for Time Format Changer so it now displays the date as "Xth day of Season".
• Each month's season was modified in the Seasons of Skyrim INI file (see below).
• There is a preset for Seasonal Weathers Framework that modifies the weathers per season to match (again, see below).
  

In order to have a "complete" experience, i.e., with matching seasonal weather and a modified UI, you need to grab all three of the mods mentioned (Seasons of Skyrim, Time Format Changer, Seasonal Weathers Framework).

This also means NO messing with the time scale in any way as that can seriously break the game.

Distribution of Months

As you can see, the game still starts in Summer (the 17th day). The season will shift to autumn after the first 15 or so hours and then you'll have autumn for 25-30 hours depending on how much time you let pass by waiting/sleeping/fasttravelling.

• MORNING STAR (January) - Autumn
• SUN'S DAWN (February) - Winter
• FIRST SEED (March) Spring
• RAIN'S HAND (April) - Summer
• SECOND SEED (May) - Autumn
• MID YEAR (June) - Winter
• SUN'S HEIGHT (July) - Spring
• LAST SEED (August) - Summer
• HEARTHFIRE (September) - Autumn
• FROST FALL (October) - Winter
• SUN'S DUSK (November) - Spring
• EVENING STAR (December) - Summer
  

Compatibility

Out of the box, this will work with anything that uses Seasons of Skyrim to determine the current season. Of course, that includes Turn of the Seasons.

Survival Mode will not work out of the box. I've talked to colinswrath about how Survival determines the season/temperature and have a rough idea, but I don't use any survival mods myself so making it compatible is low on my list of priorities.

Holidays would potentially work but festivities and seasons would be mismatched so using both mods together would make very little sense.



PERMISSIONS

Do whatever.

CREDITS

Thanks to po3 for Seasons of Skyrim and Tate Taylor for Turn of the Seasons!
Thanks again to Tate for brainstorming with me on this "mod".
Thanks to Vermunds for pointing out how easily month names can be changed.