Almanac - The Illustrated Year

Your farming sim already knows what the year did. Almanac draws it.

Point it at the season, crop and event data you already have — the crop's name, how far through growth it is, what the weather did, which days are feasts — and it composes the illustrated year. A printed almanac page per season: laid paper under a plate impression, a woodcut weather glyph struck against each day that has one, the moon ruled across the head of the month, gilded feast cards on the days that carry them, and a strip along the foot where every crop stands at the stage your own number says it has reached.

Four seasons become four different pages, and you drew none of them.

Nothing in it is a stored image

There is no PNG, no atlas, no sprite sheet, no shader and no material anywhere in this package. Every page is drawn in code, at runtime or in the editor, from a corpus of 62 hand-authored marks you can read and edit:

• 16 weather glyphs — clear, haze, overcast, drizzle, rain, downpour, thunder, hail, sleet, snow, blizzard, frost, fog, gale, heat, rainbow. Every one has its own envelope, not one cloud with sixteen different things falling out of it.
• 30 crop growth marks — six habits (cereal, root, vine, brassica, gourd, orchard bough) drawn at five stages each: sown, sprout, leaf, bud, ripe.
• 8 feast cards — the sowing, first fruits, midsummer, harvest home, the lantern night, the frost fair, the turning year, market day. Each on its own card shape, gilded.
• 4 moon phases and 4 season treatments, each season with its own marginal motif, border ornament and margin density.

A growth stage is a different plant, not a bigger one

This is the rule the whole product is built on. A cereal goes seed in a drill, then a hooked coleoptile, then a fan of strap blades, then an ear standing upright in the boot, then a nodding awned ear. A root goes seed on a ridge, then cotyledons over a radicle, then a rosette, then the root's own shoulder breaking the soil, then the whole tuber lifted with its tops trimmed.

Nothing in either sequence is a scaled copy of the picture before it, because five sizes of one shape is a progress bar and you already have one of those.

It draws no text

Almanac ships no font, measures no string and renders no words. It draws the picture and leaves the masthead and the label areas clear, so your own TextMeshPro, Text or IMGUI labels sit over it with your fonts, your localisation and your rich text exactly as they are. Unity is extremely good at text; nothing this package could do would beat it.

Your own words choose the marks

Crop names and weather words are matched whole-word and case-insensitively, so "Winter Wheat" finds the cereal habit and "hard frost" finds the frost glyph. You rename nothing and you author no parallel table of art metadata.

Where a word is unknown the three families deliberately behave differently, because they are asserting different things. A crop always draws: the row exists, so a plant is standing there and only its species is in doubt. Weather draws only when the day names weather — an unrecognised word still draws, because you asserted the weather was worth recording, but a day naming nothing leaves the column blank rather than inventing a forecast for a game with no weather model. A feast is never guessed at all. Most days are not feasts, so the card only means anything while it is rare, and a card your data never asked for is a lie printed in gold on the player's calendar.

Every fallback is stable, keyed on the almanac's own title and year, so the same record draws the same page every launch. A page whose art moves is worse than a page with no art, because the picture is how the player finds their way back to it.

What is in the box

• A demo scene that composes one page lazily, so it appears immediately instead of freezing on load, and prints its own compose time on your machine.
• An editor window (Window › CSAF › Almanac) with a preview and a derivation panel that tells you, per row, which of your own words selected each mark and which fell through to a derived one. That distinction is the one you need when a crop draws the wrong plant.
• An almanac year asset you can author in the inspector, so you can type four crop names and see a page before writing a line of code.
• Full, readable C# source. Nothing obfuscated, nothing minified, no DLLs.
• Three platform-constrained assembly definitions and no Resources/ folder, so nothing is forced into your build.

Compatibility

Unity 2022.3 or newer. Built and gated against 6000.5.7f1 with warnings as errors. Render-pipeline agnostic: it is a CPU rasteriser that hands you a Texture2D, so it works identically on Built-in, URP, HDRP and a custom pipeline. Cost is dominated by the page's pixel count rather than by how many marks are on it — the marks are rasterised onto small tiles and blitted, never drawn at page scale — and the demo scene, the editor window and the test suite all print the real figure for your machine.

Licence

Use it on unlimited projects, commercial or free, forever. Keep 100% of your revenue. The pages it draws for your calendar are yours — ship them in your game, on its store page, in its trailer, with no attribution required. Do not resell the tool itself, and do not repackage its output as a standalone art pack. Full terms in LICENSE.txt.

AI disclosure

The source and the store imagery were produced with AI assistance, and that is declared truthfully here and on every storefront. The artwork is not produced by an image model: it is drawn by the software rasteriser in this package, from the hand-authored corpus described above, offline, with no network call anywhere in the art path.

More from CSAF

More Unity editor tools from the same studio:

• Assembly Warden
• GUID Warden — Unity Meta & GUID Integrity Guard
• Vellum — Illuminated Item Cards From Your Own Item Data (Unity 6)
• Waymark

Everything else we make is at csaf.itch.io.