Elder Weathers 1.0.0

Original Skyrim weathers generated from a physical atmosphere model rather than hand-tuned tables.

What it is

Nineteen weathers across seven families, a climate override, and a full Tamriel region pass, shipping as one light ESL-flagged plugin (EWWeathers.esp). No SKSE required. Works alongside any ENB.

A single-scattering model (Rayleigh spectrum, Kasten-Young air mass, turbidity-scaled Mie term) evaluates each archetype at four times of day and fills the full 17-type weather colour block: sky colours, fog planes, cloud colours, and directional ambient.

Seven archetypes span the weather space: clear, cloudy, overcast, rain, storm, fog, snow. Each family then carries variants sampled from the same parameter space, for nineteen weathers in total. A variant is not a recolour: it satisfies its family's physics and sits where its name claims, so dense fog really does pull the far plane nearer than mist, and a blizzard really is darker and windier than light snow. Both are asserted as build invariants.

What is authored and what is inherited

Every value the model speaks for is generated: colour block, fog, wind, sun glare, classification flags, lightning colour, cloud colours, directional ambient. Structural fields the model does not cover (cloud texture paths, layer alphas, precipitation and visual-effect references, sky statics, image spaces) are inherited from the matching vanilla weather family by form reference. There are no third-party values in the output.

Verification

Built and gated against a real Skyrim.esm: 64 tests passing, including the ground-truth suite that checks the generated records against actual game data. The model is tested by physical invariant rather than by matching known values. One measure of the grounding: the clear-sunrise zenith lands within three points per channel of the vanilla value, without ever reading it.

EWWeathers.esp — 76,379 bytes, 19 weathers, 1 climate override, 21 region overrides, re-parse clean.

Scope, stated plainly

In-game visual validation is ahead of this release. The build gates prove format correctness, physical coherence, and character preservation. They do not prove it is beautiful. That judgment is yours, and feedback is welcome.

Install

Install ElderWeathers-1.0.0.zip with a mod manager and enable EWWeathers.esp, sort your load order, then load a save outdoors or wait for the weather to cycle.

It overrides weather, climate, and region distribution, so let it win those records over other weather mods or patch between them. It does not touch scripted quest weathers or non-Tamriel worldspaces. City worldspaces are a later pass.

License

MIT. Use it, modify it, patch it, and build weathers on it, with credit.

ElderWeathers-1.0.0.zip sha256 811a10343b174d80ba1dd58e639c224dd39e9b1065fe1980d153cd575e4e1c5f