Where Winds Blow

Added

• Direct support for Acedium Sodiumized 0.4.1 when its NVIDIA terrain renderer is active.
• A Terrain Renderer Backend compatibility setting with Automatic, Sodium, and Acedium / Nvidium choices. Changing the renderer integration settings now rebuilds responsive foliage immediately.
• Convention-based biome world-generation profiles using NeoForge c: tags, allowing suitably tagged modded plains, forests, jungles, savannas, taigas, swamps, rivers, deserts, and badlands to inherit built-in grass placement.
• A dedicated has_tall_grass_fields profile for plains and meadows, with tall-grass passes at 25% of normal frequency.
• Field-specific overgrown grass in plains and meadows at 12.5% of normal frequency.
• Light short-grass scatter placement using the no-leaves heightmap, improving coverage beneath trees and across uneven terrain.
• A bounded grass_cover world-generation feature for dense, medium, and sparse short grass. It evaluates each chunk column once, adds coherent noise variation, honors configured density passes, and caps total coverage at 88%.
• Bonemeal progression for grass variants: flat grass grows into vanilla short grass, while a complete two-block tall-grass plant grows into a three-block overgrown-grass column when space permits.
• Responsive-foliage composition with Continuity model wrappers, preserving connected and emissive rendering while applying wind and interaction behavior to the underlying foliage model.
• Snow! Real Magic compatibility for snow-covered plants and leaves, including contained-block profile detection, column sway, local interaction, preserved vertex marker alpha, and snow top surfaces that move with supporting leaves.
• Block-update and chunk-unload invalidation hooks shared by lantern and snowfall caches, keeping cached render data synchronized with world changes.

Changed

• Dynamic wind simulation time now stops while the game window is inactive and resumes without a time jump when focus returns.
• The terrain-renderer compatibility toggle was generalized from "Sodium Wind Patch" to "Terrain Renderer Integration" so it controls all supported terrain backends.
• Grass biome assignments now favor ecosystem profiles: jungles and cherry groves receive dense short grass; plains, forests, savannas, and meadows receive medium short grass; taigas and windswept biomes receive sparse short grass; forests, jungles, savannas, and cherry groves receive regular tall grass; forests, taigas, and jungles receive fern accents; swamps, rivers, and flower forests receive regular overgrown grass; deserts and badlands receive dry grass; and savannas receive dead grass.
• Tall-grass, fern, overgrown-grass, and wild-wheat placement was expanded from mostly vanilla biome lists to convention tags, improving compatibility with modded biomes while retaining special vanilla biome entries where needed.
• Tall-grass and fern placement now uses terrain noise to form broad coherent regions rather than evenly distributed spots.
• Tall-grass patches now use smaller, less dense irregular interiors with a short-grass fringe.
• Overgrown-grass patches now use smaller, sparser height-graded cores that transition through tall grass into mixed short grass.
• Dense, medium, and sparse built-in short-grass generation now uses one bounded cover feature per profile instead of repeated scatter and cluster features. Per-pass base coverage is 10%, 6.5%, and 3.5%, respectively, with a 5:2 mix of vanilla short grass to flat grass.
• Swinging-lantern discovery is now cached until an actual block update or chunk unload, reducing chunk scans from six to two per frame; collision checks run every two ticks instead of every frame.
• GPU snowfall now caches surface-height and biome precipitation samples with bounded caches, refreshes visible data only after movement or relevant world changes, and clears caches when changing levels.
• CPU snowfall fallback density was reduced: fancy range 12->10, fancy flakes per column 12->8, fast range 7->6, fast flakes per column 6->4, and fancy vertical span 22->20.

Removed

• Periodic rescanning of cached swinging-lantern chunks.
• Full GPU snowfall terrain and precipitation resampling every five ticks.
• The built-in dense, medium, and sparse biome modifiers' legacy eight-pass scatter/cluster feature chains; their datapack definitions remain available, but the default profiles now route through bounded cover passes.

Added

• Added configurable blizzards during severe snowy weather, featuring terrain-aware ground spindrift, custom snow, and smooth whiteout fog.
• Added separate controls for normal and blizzard snowflake amount, size, and speed, plus configurable snowfall fog modes and intensity.
• Added optional desert and badlands sandstorms with wind-driven screen-space dust, terrain-aware rendering, biome-specific sand coloring, and visibility-reducing fog. Sandstorm effects and fog are disabled by default while I tune it.
• Added configurable, wind driven tumbleweeds in deserts and badlands.
• Added wind blown flower petals from nearby flowers.
• Added a toggle for wind blown leaf particles.
• Added dynamic rain squalls and configurable rain-angle variation.
• Added resource-driven foliage sway profiles. Client resource packs can now configure blocks and tags, motion types, priorities, opt-outs, interaction behavior, and per-profile height and strength scaling.
• Added foliage compatibility profiles for:
  • Bountiful Fares
  • Farmer’s Delight
  • No Man’s Land
  • Regions Unexplored
  • Sweety’s Garden
• Added biome-specific wind profiles for No Man’s Land.
• Added configurable, noise-clustered fern accents to world generation.
• Added foliage color variation controls.
• Added an in-game warning explaining Iris shader-pack limitations.

Changed

• Rebuilt snowfall around a dedicated shader-driven GPU renderer with a deterministic CPU fallback, improved vertical sampling, terrain clipping, and smoother animation.
• Rain and snow now render in separate precipitation passes and transition more smoothly as weather conditions change.
• Rain and snow now react more naturally to local wind, thunder, gusts, squalls, and wind lulls.
• Foliage sway now responds to current weather conditions, including storm loading, lulls, and gust fronts.
• Foliage interaction now produces directional motion wakes, movement trails, stationary pressure, and vertical influence.
• Responsive foliage animation now supports stepped movement, improved sheen, low-profile plants, tall columns, and top-anchored hanging plants.
• Wind streaks now use cleaner halo-and-core rendering, improved motion paths, near-camera fading, and revised spawning.
• Drifting leaf particles now match nearby oak, spruce, birch, jungle, acacia, dark oak, mangrove, cherry, and azalea foliage.
• Local biome wind sampling is now smoothed when crossing biome boundaries.
• Tall and overgrown grass generation now forms irregular clustered patches with fringes and height-graded cores.
• Responsive foliage section invalidation, column scanning, and model caches are now bounded and more efficient.
• Wind, foliage, particle, weather, and decoration settings have been reorganized into more focused configuration groups.

Fixed

• Fixed wind sheen causing grass to appear white under moody brightness.
• Fixed twisting and weeping vines bending from the wrong anchor.
• Fixed incorrect wind and interaction scaling on pink petals and other low-profile foliage.
• Fixed azaleas, sea pickles, and waterlilies being deformed as generic bush foliage.
• Fixed randomized block-model offsets splitting foliage interaction sampling across block boundaries.

Compatibility

• ToucanLib 0.4.0 is now a required dependency.

• Initial Release!