Setting Up Clouds

Get the volumetric clouds running, deliver the cloud fog pack and let each player pick a detail level. The guide has five steps.

What you need

• A server on Minecraft 1.21.11 or newer. On an older server the console says Atmosphere clouds need Minecraft 1.21.11 or newer; cloud layer disabled.
• The weather simulation running in your world, see steps 1 and 2 of Setting Up Weather.
• A world in one of the four shipped seasons, so the vanilla clouds are hidden. See Hiding the vanilla clouds.
• The mythicseasons.admin permission (operators have it).

MythicMobs is not needed for the clouds. Paths are relative to plugins/MythicSeasons.

Step 1: Check that the clouds and the fog pack are on

These three values in atmosphere.yml are true as shipped:

enabled: true
clouds:
  enabled: true
  shader-pack:
    enabled: true

If one is false, set it to true. enabled and clouds.enabled need a restart, /ms reload is not enough. The first start with the fog pack on writes the pack file and prints:

clouds.shader-pack: wrote <path> (pack formats 34-100, 6 client variants, <n> shader looks, sha1 <hash>)

The line shows only when the file is written, so copy the hash now if you need it. The file is:

plugins/MythicSeasons/MythicSeasons-CloudFog.zip

Atmosphere cloud rendering is unavailable on this server build; cloud layer disabled. means your server build cannot draw the clouds.

Step 2: Switch your world on

A world is switched on when it first gets a season. If /ms atmosphere info has no line for your world, stand in it and run:

/ms atmosphere toggle

Atmosphere in <world>: on confirms it. A line ending in off means the world was already on, so run the command again.

Step 3: Check that the layer runs

Run:

/ms atmosphere info

The last lines before the usage line read:

Clouds: on, detail automatic, occlusion culling on
Quality: off, low, medium, high (default high)
Fog pack: on (MythicSeasons-CloudFog.zip), 0 shader looks, no style has a shader look

The shipped cumulus layer draws the weather's own clouds, so the sky can be empty at first. As a player, run:

/ms atmosphere stats

The Renderer: line arrives a moment after the rest:

Renderer: quality high, spawned <a>/<b> quads

<a> counts the cloud faces (quads) on your client, <b> those that should exist around you. The line reads no cloud view yet until the cloud layer has processed you.

Step 4: Deliver the cloud fog pack

The fog pack removes the fog at the edge of each client's render distance from the clouds. MythicSeasons only writes the file. Deliver it one of two ways:

• Serve plugins/MythicSeasons/MythicSeasons-CloudFog.zip as your server resource pack. The console line of step 1 holds its SHA-1 in lowercase.
• Merge it into the pack you already serve. Copy the six mythicseasons_* folders with their entries in the overlays section of pack.mcmeta, unchanged, and the assets/mythicseasons folder at the root of the pack. A tool that rebuilds pack.mcmeta must understand overlays, see Shader Pack.

When the plugin writes a changed file, for example after you change fog-start or fog-end, upload it again and update the hash.

On 1.21 to 1.21.5 clients the pack removes all fog from the clouds, so they have no depth haze unless you set both fog-start and fog-end in clouds.shader-pack.

Step 5: Let players pick their detail level

Every player chooses a preset with /cloudquality. Without an argument it shows yours:

/cloudquality

Cloud quality: high, change with /cloudquality <off/low/medium/high>

Choose a preset:

/cloudquality low

Cloud quality: low

The choice is saved and applies in every world.

To give players who have not chosen another preset, set clouds.quality.default in atmosphere.yml, for example to medium, and run /ms reload. See Cloud Quality for every preset key.

Hiding the vanilla clouds

The plugin hides the vanilla clouds by sending players biome copies with an invisible cloud colour, in worlds whose season uses one of the four shipped colour slots (winter, summer, spring or fall). The vanilla clouds still draw next to the new ones when:

• enabled or clouds.enabled was off when the server started.
• The world has no season, or its season is one you wrote with biome-color-index: -1, such as the one in Your First Season.
• The player ran /toggleseasoncolors (in chunks sent afterwards).
• modify-biome-on-client is false in config.yml.
• No file in biomes recolours that biome for the season.

A world with a season that is switched off with /ms atmosphere toggle shows no clouds at all.

If no clouds show

1. Your own preset is not off (/cloudquality shows it).
2. Cloud layers: none in /ms atmosphere profile means the world is not switched on, clouds.layers is empty or no layer loaded.
3. Clouds: none (simulated none) in /ms atmosphere stats means the simulation has no cloud where you stand, and cumulus draws only where it has.
4. A note such as tiles still meshing or gen swap pending on the Renderer: line means the sky around you is still being built.
5. No WorldGuard region around you sets season-clouds to deny. See Land Claims.

See No Clouds for the full checklist.

Next steps

• Clouds, Cloud Options and Shader Pack cover the clouds and the pack in depth.
• Custom Cloud Layer and Custom Climate Profile are the next guides.