Realistic weather and seasons

[MsCreeper97 2]

So, I've been looking through this forum, and I am quite surprised that no one suggested a more realistic weather system.

I'm not a mod creator, obviously, but I saw a beautiful seasons mod some time ago, and I know it can be done here too.

 

I think that the weather and the environment should drastically change during every season, and new features like snow (and not just normal vanilla snow, I'm talking about layers of snow covering the terrain.) and monsoons should be implemented in this mod.

 

Main Features:

 

• The weather will change every season, and different changes will be shown in different terrains (snow, heavy rain, drought).
• Temperature will play an even more important role now, because staying in the cold for too long will kill you, and staying under the blazing sun for too long will exhaust and dehydrate you. (clothing is essential for the players survival abilities).
• Crops will die and trees will drop their leaves, so good luck staying warm and well fed during the harsh winter, you miserable farmers!
• Lighting fires and staying warm is more important now, and until the player will create good clothing, getting wood and creating warm sources is crucial.
• Different day lengths, the sun shines less during the winter.

 

By the way, another small idea: forests should grow slowly by themselves, old trees should die and make room for new ones.

 

Anyway, thanks for reading, and please, if you think of any other ideas, be sure to add them in the comments.

 

[Visitor 36]

Some of it to my knowledge is already in - temperature, if I remember correctly, changes somewhat over seasons. However, I would like to agree/point out that more land with temperate climate would do us well. Currently, too many places are either frozen whole/most of the year or evergreen and finding a part of the world, especially while staying all the time in regular survival mode, which would have hot summers and winters with some snowing is very hard.

 

I wouldn't want to put too big of an emphasis on temperature's effect on player character. Sure, some effect would be nice but I'd rather avoid having to juggle sets of equipment every time I go to different part of the world, underground and so on. Possibly I'd set bigger variation of temperature outside, for air blocks, but leave indoors one mostly static, with far smaller variation, thus allowing a decent hut to retain a bit of warmth during winter and offer a cooling shade in summer. It would also prevent player from being forced to keep fire on in their place at all times in colder climate - a thing which may be fun once or twice but would become boring, unplayable chore at some point for most players.

 

Some slowness status could be possibly provided for very cold areas as would increased consumption of water be for very hot ones but I wouldn't want to go further than that either for the reasons mentioned above.

 

Crops being affected by temperature, and thus stereotypical winter are already in and I don't need any changes here including outright dying. Them not growing more is realistic enough simulation of hardy crops surviving winter before flourishing again.

 

Different day lengths would be possibly quite nice. Currently, with gameplay of TFC day in general seems a bit too short, but I guess I wouldn't mind it it's length like that during winter and slightly longer day during summer - provided that player will be in aforementioned temperate region (which brings us to possible issue with discrepancy when different players are in different regions, some perpetually snowy and some tropical). I think it also wouldn't ba a bad idea to make winter darker by 1, 2 points of light level to simulate the gloom, while keeping summer days at maximum brightness for longer - just till short evening.

 

In regards to trees - aren't forests spawning some saplings from time to time? If not, I guess I wouldn't mind them to do so if there's big swath of deforested land. They should do it rarely, though so decently-sized forest regeneration actually will take years encouraging ecology-oriented attitude and manual replanting of tress, a thing which at least one of the devs is fond of according to FAQ.

[corki99 23]

I like it. Players should be affected more by the season and weather

[landryx 36]

Some mechanisms are very hard coded into vanilla code, like day lengths, so hum...yeah. And an natural regrowing forest cycle could be nice but maybe a bit too CPU demanding I think...

I'm sure Kitty, bioxx, dunk or others programmers could tell us more.

 

A body temperature system is planned for futur builds tough 

[Kittychanley 1,002]

Welcome to the forums! A lot of things that you have suggested are already in the mod, or are already planned for future builds.

• Snow already piles up in layers when it's snowing. The way that vanilla minecraft handles rain is based off of simply a random timer, and it will be extremely difficult to override this to make rain based on the season.
• Temperature changes with the season, which can be most obviously seen by the leaves of trees changing colors as well as the grass.
• A Body Temperature system was already in the works for B78, but was commented out and pushed back to a later build because it was taking so long to code. Running around, using tools, and hanging out in areas where the temperature is high (including around firepits and lava) will increase your body temperature, while standing in pools of water or hanging out in cold areas will decrease it. An overheated player's thirst and hunger will deplete faster than a cold one.
• Crops do die if the temperatures drop below about 5C, depending on the plant. A very few crops are hardy however, and will survive the winter if they were in the initial stage of growth when the freeze happened. Leaves don't fall off the trees, but they do turn brown. Fruit Tree and Berry Bush harvests are already based on season as well, with none of them fruiting in the winter months.
• As landryx stated, day length is actually hardcoded into vanilla Minecraft, and it would also be extremely difficult to override. It was an option in the config a while back for TFC, but was extremely buggy resulting in things like mobs spawning in broad daylight, and growth calculations being broken.
• Saplings and tall grass already regenerate in areas where the temperature is at least 20C. Which saplings randomly generate is dependent on the trees that were in the area on initial world gen.

[landryx 36]

Kittychanley

"Saplings and tall grass already regenerate in areas where the temperature is at least 20C. Which saplings randomly generate is dependent on the trees that were in the area on initial world gen."

 

You're serious!   That's cool!

[Kittychanley 1,002]

I just double checked, and the saplings actually require line of sight to the sky, so obviously dense forests will have a harder time growing more saplings than regular ones.

[Dano6655 7]

Is it possible to improve snow generation? Right now it's tied to the loaded chunks and only accumulates/melts in those areas so it makes moving around look really awkward. Especially if you use minimap.

[cjworks 2]

What about:

 

- Clouds build up moisture from water and moist biomes

 

- Weathers system uses biome temperature differences to trigger storms

 

- Localized storms that you view from afar and that move

 

- Falling leaf particles and waterfall effects after storms

 

- Trees make blowing in storms, waterfalls make strong water sounds

 

Effects on animals:

 

- The chances of catching fish are also much higher in the day than at night, also increased during rain and further increased if you do it during dawn, full moon or dusk. 

 

- Animals will try to move away from fire and find shelter in bad weather

[Trulhammaren 5]

There is a mod out there that does localized weather quite well already, I'll need to go hunt it down really quickly. A minor note being it is kinda a resource hog.

 

EDIT: http://coros.us/mods/weather2  There we are, I was quite happy with how it changed the way weather worked, despite my first three unlucky spawns as I got hit with tornado's during the first night all three times, but nontheless I did enjoy it. Too bad my machine just simply can't keep up with the resources needed.

[cjworks 2]

There is a mod out there that does localized weather quite well already, I'll need to go hunt it down really quickly. A minor note being it is kinda a resource hog.

 

EDIT: http://coros.us/mods/weather2  There we are, I was quite happy with how it changed the way weather worked, despite my first three unlucky spawns as I got hit with tornado's during the first night all three times, but nontheless I did enjoy it. Too bad my machine just simply can't keep up with the resources needed.

I know, I'd love to see some of the simple features integrated for beleivability purposes

[Kittychanley 1,002]

If another mod already implements a feature and does it well, TFC will simply ensure compatibility with that mod instead of copying it into TFC. TFC is not an end all be all mod, we want you to use it in combination with other mods to customize your experience.

[cjworks 2]

Understood

[Wandering_eye 3]

On The subject of time between weather, I believe it can be stored in a variable because with the command for changing the weather, you are also able to specify a time that weather remains for. TFC could edit this variable depending on the season, maybe make the time between rains be longer in summer and shorter in the winter. This could be achieved by giving each little segment of a season a value which it would change the time between weather by.