Weather

Regional rain

Rain no longer falls on the whole world at once. It comes with storms that drift on the wind, and there are three kinds:

kind	size	how long
showers, some with thunder	a few hundred blocks	pass within an hour
fronts	a few thousand blocks	rain for most of a day
broad rains	wide	hang on for days or weeks in a wet spell

Each region has its own wet and dry spells lasting days to weeks. Snow, filling cauldrons and lightning only happen under a storm.

Highs and lows a few thousand blocks across drift with the prevailing wind, and the wind turns around them. Storms gather in the lows, so a falling barometer means rain is coming.

How much rain a place gets depends on where it is: from under 200 mm a year to 3,000 mm. Coasts are wetter than the interior, a range facing the wind is wettest of all, and the land behind it lies in a rain shadow. Operators can see a place's yearly rain with /geology storms climate.

Seasons

With Serene Seasons, rainfall follows a climate type:

climate	wettest time
Mediterranean	wet winter, dry summer
monsoon	summer
oceanic	autumn
continental	late spring
tropical	its own wet and dry seasons

Summers bring showers and winters long fronts. Rivers rise and fall with the seasons (see Water and Soil).

In the sky

• Heavy cumulus and front cloud sit over storms, drift with the wind and can be seen from far away. Elsewhere, fair-weather cumulus.
• Lightning flashes inside the cloud, and thunder arrives a second later for every 340 blocks of distance.
• When it really rains, the sky closes over.
• Rain slants with the wind, up to about 20°, splashes where it lands and drips from eaves and leaves. On the windward side it gets a block under the roof edge.
• On a mountain: under the cloud base it rains, inside the cloud there is pale fog and drizzle, and above it the sky is clear over a sea of cloud.
• The air holds water vapour too. On still nights it fills up and fog lies in low ground until the morning sun. Humid afternoons can break into thunderstorms, and a long rain dries the air out.

Other mods and commands

• /weather rain and /weather thunder bring a storm over the players, and /weather clear (or sleeping through the night) clears the sky.
• Other mods asking whether it rains get the answer for their own spot. Tough As Nails does not wet you in the sun, and bees do not head home at noon because of a storm somewhere else.
• Shader packs (Oculus) draw the rain themselves and get the full rain value when it really rains.
• The mod plays vanilla's rain sound. The FT's Geology: Feel the Nature addon adds recorded rain and wind.
• With TerraFirmaCraft, regional rain is off and TFC's own climate runs.
• Operators: /geology storms (the weather here), storms climate, storms spawn <strength> [radius], storms wind <speed> <toward>.
• Settings: regionalRain, rainAmount, rainStrength, stormLength, stormSize; client: stormClouds, rainSlant, shaderOvercast.

The weather station is on Instruments and Stations.

See also: Water and Soil, Mountains and Landmarks.