Options

The clouds section of atmosphere.yml picks the cloud layers and sets how far and how finely they are drawn, their colours, storms and the cloud fog pack. Each layer has its own file, see Layer Options.

"Per season" says whether a season, world or profile block can change the setting (see Overrides). Everything applies on /ms reload except enabled. A typo directly under clouds is reported in the console, but a typo under shader-pack, quality or biome-colors is ignored without a message.

Switch and layers

• At startup, with both switches on, seasonal biomes get a see-through vanilla cloud colour, which hides the vanilla clouds. So a world with a season shows no clouds at all when its simulation is off or its list is []. See Known limits.
• Clouds: unavailable in /ms atmosphere info means the server is older than 1.21.11, its build cannot draw clouds, or a switch was off at startup. Fix the cause, then restart.
• The last block that sets layers replaces the whole list. A season file wins over a world block, so to change one world in every season, give that world a profile.
• The first solid layer (opacity 1.0) is the one players can be inside. In-cloud checks use it, and rain needs its cloud overhead. See Cloud Layers.

Distance and detail

Each cloud face is an entity sent to the player, so a longer distance and finer detail cost more on the server and on clients.

• The shipped presets set their own render-distance (1024, 1536 and 2048) and fov-cull-angle, so the values above only matter for presets that leave them out. See Cloud Quality.
• A layer is drawn out to the smaller of the preset's distance and the layer's max-distance. The distance also sets how far around a player the weather is simulated.
• Nothing caps a pinned lod-level. Level 0 or 1 with a long distance draws a huge number of cloud entities and slows the server and every client.
• sample-size turns clouds that are one weather cell wide or tall (pillars and flat slabs) into rounded clouds. Rain, wind and temperature keep their full detail. xz is rounded down to a power of two and capped at one region (16 weather cells). A new size changes how much cloud is drawn, so the layers' forms-at, full-at and coverage may need new values.
• In third-person front view (F5 twice) clouds ahead of the camera can drop out, because the server cannot see that camera.

With occlusion-culling on, faces behind a hill, a cave roof or a wall are not shown either.

• Only full opaque blocks in chunks the plugin has read count, and only when they are at least 8 blocks in front of the face.
• While a player moves 10 blocks per second or faster, for example when flying, terrain hides nothing.
• Faces within a layer's no-cull-distance of the player are never hidden.
• Blocks that are broken, blown up, burnt, faded, changed by an entity or moved by a piston count at once. Other changes, such as commands or WorldEdit, count within 10 seconds in the chunks around each player.
• After /ms reload turns occlusion-culling on, the plugin reads the chunks around players within 10 seconds and other chunks when they load or change. A restart reads every loaded chunk.

Colour

• Set tint in the season files to give each season its own sky. An empty "" in a block does not remove a tint that an earlier block set, use FFFFFF for that.
• A layer with its own color ignores biome-colors. tint applies on top of both.
• The cloud_color attribute of a biome file does not colour these clouds.

Storms

• Only layers of type outflow draw outflow: the shipped cirrus, cirrus-hooks and cirrostratus. See Layer Types.
• wind-y: -1 uses physics.tropopause-height, or the top of the simulated sky when that height lies in the fast upper winds (forcing.jet-layers). A wind-y inside those winds makes high cloud travel.

Cloud fog pack

These settings sit under clouds.shader-pack, only in atmosphere.yml. The pack removes the fog wall around far clouds, see Shader Pack.

Quality presets

These settings sit under clouds.quality, only in atmosphere.yml. Players pick a preset with /cloudquality, see Cloud Quality. The shipped presets low, medium and high come back with their shipped values when the file loads without them.

Examples

worlds:
  mining_world:
    clouds:
      layers: []
  resource_world:
    clouds:
      layers: [cumulus, ground-fog]

mining_world draws no clouds and resource_world adds ground fog. Every other world uses the list in clouds.

atmosphere:
  clouds:
    layers: [cumulus, cirrus]
    tint: "C8D4E6"

In a season file: cumulus and high cirrus under a cool blue-grey tint.

Console messages