How to Change Seasons in Forza Horizon 4

Forza Horizon 4 features seasons, not only in terms of content available but actual different parts of the virtual year. This means that certain events are tied to certain seasons, so you might only be able to tackle some during the cold winter months and others during the heat of summer. These seasons are hard coded into the makeup of the game, with the game having a set number of real world days for each period. There is a way to cheat the system, though, letting you choose whether to race in spring, summer, fall, or winter.
If you are after help with any other aspect of Forza Horizon 4, you’ll want to check out our Forza Horizon 4 guide. It’s on this main guides page that you can find all the introductory tips and tricks for all newcomers, as well as a complete list of changes that Turn 10 has made for this edition of the game.

Can You Manually Change Seasons in Forza Horizon 4?

Unfortunately, Forza Horizon 4 makes changing seasons a bit of a hassle and not something at all obvious. You’ll start Forza Horizon 4 in Spring, and the game makes it clear that you have to earn a certain amount of Influence to advance, before competing in an event to unlock Summer. You repeat this process to unlock Fall and Winter, until you’re back to where you started in Spring. This is simply a kind of introduction to the season in Forza Horizon 4, with the game from this point onwards slipping into a cycle.

Once you’ve made it back to Spring and have completed the full annual cycle, Forza Horizon 4 puts you into a seasonal server. Every week the season will switch to the the next one, and you can't break out of this seasonal cycle during normal play.

 
But, there’s one tiny trick or cheat to circumvent this and manually chose the season you want to race in. If you can use the Blueprint feature in Forza Horizon 4 and create a custom race, you can pick which season you want to race in. So, if you’re longing to get back to Spring when you’re in the middle of Summer, you can do just that in a custom race. On top of this, players on your friends list can also use this feature, and then allow you to pick their custom course, for whichever season they’ve chosen. It’s not an ideal way of getting around the seasons that are tied to servers, but it’s the only way possible.

Being locked into a certain season for a week in Forza Horizon 4 is one area of the game that fans seems mixed on. At the moment it's not clear if this could be changed by Playground Games (or if the studio would even want to do so), but we'll let you know should the current setup change.

We might now be all done with this Forza Horizon 4 guide on the seasons, but we’ll be sure to update this guide if we find a more concrete way of changing the in-game seasons. For now though, you can head over to our Forza Horizon car list guide, or our Forza Horizon 4 Barn Finds guide, where we list the location of every Barn in the game.