Weather & Survival

The sky over the city genuinely changes with the seasons and can genuinely hurt you if you ignore it — here's how to read it, vote on it, and survive it.

The City’s Weather Is Alive

Weather on The Estate isn’t cosmetic. It’s run server-side, tracked separately across the City, Sandy Shores and Paleto, and moves through four seasons that can cycle automatically or be set manually by staff. Transitions are smooth rather than instant, so you’ll see conditions shift gradually rather than snap from clear skies to a downpour. The server can also be configured to mirror real-world conditions for its setting, so what’s happening outside your window isn’t always a coincidence.

Because weather is regional, it’s entirely possible for the City to be dry while Paleto is under a storm — check the app rather than assuming.

The Forecast App and Casting Your Vote

Open the Weather app on your phone or tablet — it replaces the device’s stock weather app — and you’ll see the current conditions and “feels like” temperature, the season, the in-game time, your city and region, a queue of what’s forecast next, and, if one is running, a live weather vote.

Vote windows open on a rolling interval, or can be forced by staff for an event. While one’s open, cast your vote either in the app or with /weathervote <type>. You get one vote per window per session, and some weather types are off the table depending on the season — you won’t be voting snow into a summer. Votes tally live and feed into what actually gets picked next, so a coordinated push from enough players can genuinely swing the forecast.

The vote doesn’t guarantee your pick lands — it weights the odds. Treat it as influence, not a lever.

When the Weather Turns Extreme

Beyond day-to-day conditions, the server can trigger genuine extreme events: Earthquake, Storm, Extreme Cold, Extreme Heat, Tsunami, Meteor Shower, and Hurricane. Each one changes more than the visuals — driving conditions get worse, camera shake and screen effects kick in, and your exposure risk (below) climbs. Traffic AI reacts too, driving more cautiously — or more erratically — depending on the event.

None of this creates any police or legal exposure. An earthquake won’t get you a dispatch call, but it can absolutely put you on your back if you’re caught somewhere unstable when it hits, and driving through a storm or hurricane is a hazard in its own right, not a paperwork one.

Exposure: Surviving the Cold and the Heat

Stand out in the cold, or in the heat during the hottest part of the day, for long enough and you’ll start building an exposure severity score. The heat side ramps up with daylight — midday sun is far riskier than dusk — while cold applies more consistently. As that score climbs, it scales up how fast your hunger and thirst drain, on top of whatever else is already eating into them.

Getting under cover — indoors, or in a vehicle where that’s set up to count — zeroes your exposure score straight away. If you’re sheltering inside one of your own properties or another instanced interior, the weather itself is suppressed entirely while you’re inside, so there’s nothing to manage until you step back out.

Ducking into any interior resets your exposure instantly — there’s no need to grit your teeth and wait it out in the open.

If exposure stacks up seriously and a genuine Extreme Cold or Extreme Heat event is actually active — not just cold weather in general — you can start taking a small, non-lethal HP tick until you get somewhere safe. It won’t kill you and won’t leave an injury on record, but it’s still damage you didn’t need to take.

Fieldcraft: Building Resistance to the Elements

Toughing out sustained exposure without ducking for cover isn’t purely a punishment — it also earns you small, daily-capped Fieldcraft survival experience under Skills & Progression. It’s a slow way to build the skill, but it adds up if you spend a lot of time outdoors.

Investing in Fieldcraft pays that back directly: higher ranks reduce how fast exposure drives your hunger/thirst drain, add resistance to the exposure score itself, delay how long it takes for the first damage tick to land during an extreme event, and stretch out the gap between further ticks. Between perk investment and just knowing when to get indoors, exposure is entirely manageable — it only becomes a real problem if you ignore both the weather and the app telling you what’s coming.