Academic Year

The academic year is the calendar spine of Witchbrook. Everything a player does at Witchbrook College and across the surrounding town of Mossport runs against a single shared year clock: classes, exams, seasonal events, the passage of the weather, and the daily routines of every resident and tourist. Chucklefish has described the game as a grounded, practical school life simulation, and the academic year is the frame that holds that simulation together. A student can expect to move through structured semesters of coursework, optional summer study, and a town-wide calendar of festivals that cause Mossport itself to look and behave differently from one week to the next.

Overview

Witchbrook is built around the rhythm of going back to school. A witch-in-training enrols at the College, works through a curriculum that spans four core schools of magic, and over the course of the year develops both academic standing and a social life in town. Progression is not abstract experience points: it is classes attended, assignments handed in, exams passed, and school badges earned. The ultimate academic goal is to graduate at the top of the class, with a visible record of the disciplines a student has mastered.

At the same time, the year is not just a school schedule. Mossport has its own seasonal life that runs in parallel to the College curriculum. Residents change their clothes with the weather, shop windows redecorate with the holidays, and community festivals fill the streets on specific dates. See Overview for a broader summary of how these threads fit together; this article focuses specifically on the shape of the year itself.

Term Structure

The school year is divided into semesters, each bookended by an exam. Chucklefish has confirmed that a student must pass the semester 1 and semester 2 exams before the College will open up the advanced Arcane Arts curriculum with its rituals and demons. In practical terms, this means the first half of the year is about building a solid foundation across the introductory schools, and the second half is about specialising and taking on more dangerous material once the exams have been cleared.

Because the exams gate access to later content, the academic year naturally encourages a player to keep up with daily classes rather than skip them. Cutting class once or twice is survivable; skipping long stretches leaves a student unprepared when assessment week arrives and can push advanced disciplines further down the calendar.

Daily Class Schedule

Classes at Witchbrook College are scheduled across the day and the night, which lets the curriculum cover both the practical and the cosmological sides of magic. Daytime classes deal with material that benefits from sunlight and an alert, busy school campus; nighttime classes lean into celestial work that only really makes sense when the stars are out.

This split also feeds directly into civic life. A witch who spends the day on tarot and the night on constellation study is exactly the profile a town resident wants for a home consultation, which is a paid private reading that turns coursework into community service. In the same way, alchemy students can source ingredients during the day, brew in the afternoon, and hand-deliver finished remedies in time for evening conversations in town.

Seasons and Weather

Mossport is a town that visibly changes with the seasons. The developers have described the shift as gradual rather than instantaneous: spring fills the town with flowers bit by bit as the weeks pass, and winter arrives with darker mornings, shorter days, and a first dusting of snow rather than a sudden switch. The length of the day itself is tied to the season, so summer offers long bright afternoons and winter concentrates activity into a shorter daylight window.

Weather is not cosmetic. Different resources and jobs are available at different times of year, NPC schedules shift to match the season, and attire changes for residents, students, and tourists alike. A student who wants to make the most of the year plans around these shifts: some alchemy ingredients appear only in certain seasons, and some town jobs only open up when the weather is right.

Notable Events and Festivals

Each season brings its own public events that NPCs attend as part of their routines. The developers have confirmed a handful of named occasions, and the Oracle newsletter inside the game is dated to specific in-world days, which gives a useful sense of how the calendar is laid out across the four seasons.

Because residents attend events as part of their scheduled routines, the academic year is also a social calendar. Showing up to a festival is not just a cosmetic activity: it is an opportunity to catch townsfolk who might otherwise be hard to find, introduce the witch to potential friends and clients, and build up the reputation needed for deeper civic witchcraft and romance storylines.

Progression and Badges

Academic progress in Witchbrook is tracked publicly. Attending classes, completing assignments, and practising magic around Mossport earns school badges, and the College keeps a record of which students are at the top of which class. Chucklefish has framed this as the explicit goal of the game: to graduate at the top of the class in as many schools of magic as the player can manage over the course of the year.

• Classes. Daily attendance in the day and night curriculum, with subject matter that escalates from basic remedies and tarot fundamentals to complex potions, celestial communication, and ritual magic.

• Assignments. Practical tasks tied to a discipline, such as brewing a specific remedy or interpreting a particular spread, that consolidate what was covered in class.

• Exams. Semester 1 and semester 2 assessments, which gate access to Arcane Arts and mark the main turning points in the year.

• School badges. Awarded for practising magic consistently across the year; they function as the visible record of the witch's growing expertise in each school.

• Top of class. A ranking that recognises students whose coursework and practical work has been strongest in a given discipline.

Because the year is long and the curriculum is wide, no single student is expected to master every school in a single run. A player can choose to focus tightly on one or two disciplines and try to graduate at the top of those classes, or spread their attention more evenly and build a more general profile. Both paths are supported by the same underlying calendar of classes and exams.

Optional Summer Classes

Alongside the mandatory semester structure, the College offers optional summer classes. These exist outside the main exam pipeline and give students who want more study time a way to get it without waiting for the next school year to start. They suit players who enjoy maximising their academic output and want to go deeper on a particular school over the warmer months, as well as anyone who fell behind during the winter term and wants a second run at the same material.

Summer also has its own civic rhythm, with the long daylight hours and warmer weather opening up resource-gathering windows that are not available in other seasons. Combining summer coursework with summer alchemy work or consultation practice is a natural way to build both the academic and the practical sides of the witch in parallel.

Connection to Civic Life

The academic year is inseparable from life in Mossport. Chucklefish has emphasised that magic in Witchbrook is a grounded, practical discipline, and the coursework is designed to feed directly into town activities. Students who learn alchemy during the day turn around and sell remedies in town in the evening. Divination students take their tarot training into private home consultations for paying clients. Arcane Arts work, once unlocked, opens up more serious community rituals later in the year.

The reverse is also true: the town's calendar shapes the school year. A festival in full swing draws even studious witches out of the dorms; a seasonal shift in weather changes which ingredients the alchemy class can actually use; a busy market week alters who is available for a consultation on any given evening. The academic year is best understood not as a school schedule running in isolation but as one strand of a larger, shared calendar that the whole town lives by together.