Winter Melon attacks by lobbing frozen melon, each having an identical damage profile to those of the Melon-pult, except that they also chill zombies that are in their area of effect (3x3), slowing movement and attack speed by 50%. As with Melon-pult, Winter Melon's attack is only triggered by a zombie appearing in the lane in which he is planted. His chilling effect will be nullified if his target is also hit by attacks from fire based plants. While his attacks are powerful, he attacks slowly, but this is compensated by the slowing effect and the large splash area, taking out even mechanical enemies with terrifying ease when properly supported.
Winter Melon can be purchased from Crazy Dave's Twiddydinkies for $10,000, once the player has finished Adventure Mode for the first time. After the purchase, the player can use Winter Melon's seed packet to convert any Melon-pult present on the lawn into Winter Melon for another 200 sun. Each melon deals 80 damage per shot to the initial target, and 30 splash damage to all enemies in a 3x1 area.
Suburban Almanac entry
Winter Melon
Winter Melons do heavy damage and slow groups of zombies.
Damage: very heavy Range: lobbed Firing Speed: 1/2x Special: melons damage and freeze nearby enemies on impact Must be planted on melon-pults
Winter Melon tries to calm his nerves. He hears the zombies approach. Will he make it? Will anyone make it?
Cost: 200
Recharge: very slow
Strategies
Winter Melon can be considered as one of the most useful support plants in the game. His frozen melons, while not as powerful as Gloom-shroom's fumes or Cob Cannon's missile, are capable of chilling waves of zombies, forcing them to move and act twice as slow. This is significant in Survival Mode and vital in Survival: Endless, as the player will need as much time as possible to neutralize ever increasing numbers of Gargantuars and Football Zombies, as well as to rebuild and repair the constantly crumbling line of defense. However, Winter Melon suffers from having a very low firepower output for his massive price tag of 500 sun, and the fact that Melon-pult is required in order to plant him, making Winter Melon impractical in normal levels.
Only one column of Winter Melon should be used in any levels, as additional columns will require additional sun and time, while not increasing zombie suppression capability at all. In this case, Melon-Pult seems to be more reasonable to support it's firepower because it fires faster and has equal damage per shot. Winter Melon is also useful against Newspaper Zombies, Screen Door Zombies, Ladder Zombies, as his melons can bypass their shields.
The achievement Melon-y Lane is unlocked by planting a Winter Melon in every lane. This can easily be done on any Survival Mode level or Last Stand. It should be kept in mind that they do not all have to be alive at one given time, or in the same column. You can easily get it on Last Stand, as it is not an end-of-level achievement.
Even though he is the upgrade to Melon-pult, he is cheaper than him, costing 200 sun while his downgrade costs 300.
In older versions of the game, if his seed packet is fully recharged, and the player has accumulated enough sun to purchase it, but there are no Melon-pults on the lawn, clicking on the Winter Melon seed packet would cause a message to appear stating "Plant a Winter Melon first" instead of "Plant a Melon-pult first." despite the he can't be directly planted. This typo has been fixed in current versions of Plants vs. Zombies, but still present in the GOTY version.
According to the Suburban Almanac, he deals more damage than Melon-pult. However, he deals the same amount of damage per melon as Melon-pult.
On the PlayStation Vita version of Plants vs. Zombies, his seed packets might have part of the melon erased. It shares this trait with the Coffee Bean.
In the iPad version, he is a lot lower down on its seed packet than Melon-pult.
His stem is green, even though it is mostly colored blue. He shares this trait with Snow Pea.
In the seed packet for the iOS and Android versions, His leaves at the bottom are colored cyan instead of green.
