Tornado7

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Tornado7

Tornado7 takes vanilla weather out of the game and puts a living atmosphere in its place. Clouds form because the air makes them. On a hot humid afternoon the sky builds into supercells, and if the wind turns with height, one of them drops a tornado. Hurricanes wind up with a calm eye in the middle that you can fly into. The ground shakes along real fault lines, the sea has waves, tides and tsunamis, and the year turns through four seasons. And if you keep climbing, the sky goes black and the whole solar system is waiting up there.

It started as a storm chasing mod and it kind of got out of hand. These days it has eleven chase vehicles, a radar truck, a hurricane hunter plane, a rocket and three spaceship engines. Everything can be crafted in survival.

Watch the 6.3 trailer:

The sky

None of this is particles stuck onto rain. Every storm is a real volume of cloud, lit by the sun, with a shape that comes from how it works.

• Supercells have a flat dark base, a broad rotating updraft you can see turning, an anvil blown downwind, a wall cloud and an inflow band. You can tell what a storm is doing by looking at it, the same way real chasers do.
• Tornadoes come in over twenty shapes, from thin ropes to cones, cylinders, hourglasses, huge wedges and multi-vortex monsters, EF0 to EF5 (and an EF6 if you want to see the world end). Weak ones touch down leaning. Violent ones stand straight. They rope out at the end or get choked by their own storm’s downdraft.
• Hurricanes go from tropical storm to category 5, with rain bands, an eyewall and a quiet eye with blue sky above it.
• All ten cloud types show up on their own schedule, each with its own look: fields of cumulus, rolls and cells of stratocumulus and altocumulus, grey sheets of stratus and altostratus, real cirrus. A warm front really does warn you hours ahead: cirrus first, then a halo around the sun, then grey altostratus, then steady rain out of nimbostratus.
• Eclipses of the Sun and the Moon. They are rare and they are predicted, so you can be in the right place for totality.
• Hail that bounces and melts, lightning, rain thick enough to lose a truck in, morning fog, dust devils, wildfires and fire tornadoes.

How serious it gets is up to you

Pick a mode in the config:

• Arcade. Any big storm can drop a tornado. Pure chaos.
• Simplified. One atmosphere for the whole world, and every day has its own mood.
• Excessive Realism. Every region has its own temperature, dew point, wind and stability. Mornings sit under a cap and nothing happens. Sometime in the afternoon the cap breaks and everything fires at once. Straight wind shear gives you squall lines, curved shear gives you rotating supercells, and a storm that rained itself out leaves cold air behind, so the same spot won’t keep producing all day.

Type /t7m weather and you get the sounding for the spot you’re standing on: CAPE, CIN, the cap, shear, helicity and the storm mode. Read it right and you know where to go.

Earthquakes and tsunamis

The world has plate boundaries, and earthquakes happen along them and nowhere else. Live near one and you will feel the ground move now and then. Far from them it stays quiet.

• Buildings sway while they stand, crack, lean and come down in pieces. Slopes slide and wet ground turns to liquid.
• Aftershocks follow a big one for days.
• A seismograph records every quake and rings before the strong shaking reaches you.
• Tsunamis. A big quake under the sea pulls the water away from the shore first. Then the wave comes in as a wall, floods the coast and carries houses with it.

The sea

• Waves come from the wind: ripples on a calm day, whitecaps and swell in a gale, giant and rogue waves in an open-ocean storm.
• Tides rise and fall twice a day, and beaches go under and come back.
• Ships ride the waves. Boats and Create Aeronautics ships pitch and roll on the water you see. Sails catch the weather’s own wind, and a long ship in a heavy sea can break in two.

Seasons

The year has four seasons, and you see and hear each one.

• Winter: snow, bare trees, frozen nights and blizzards.
• Spring: dripping thaw, puddles, haze and birds.
• Summer: heat, fireflies and long evenings.
• Autumn: falling leaves, a carpet of them on the ground and fog in the morning.
• The tropics get a wet season and a dry season instead, and crops grow faster or slower with the season.

Chasing

Eleven vehicles are ready to go: TIV1, TIV2, Titus, Titan, Dominator 1, 2 and 3, Scout, Tornado Wrangler, Tornado Attack and the DOW6 mobile radar truck. They drive like real trucks. They have weight, grip and body roll, they slide if you brake into a corner too hard, and the heavy ones feel heavy. Drop the spikes and hydraulics, sit tight, and let the tornado go over you. If your truck’s wind rating is high enough.

You can also build your own. Any structure with a seat and four or more wheels becomes a car, and its weight, armor, spikes and hydraulics are measured from what you actually built.

The gear:

• Laptop with four radar views: reflectivity, velocity, correlation coefficient and the close range feed from your DOW6. The radar marks tornado vortex signatures and shows warning polygons.
• DOW6 radar truck. Park it, raise the dish, and it sees the inside of the tornado in detail no distant radar can.
• Weather balloons and dropsondes that send back a real sounding, plus a thermometer and a hygrometer that read the real air of every world, from a Martian dawn to the Nether
• Probes like TOTO and the VORTEX2 pods that you drop in the tornado’s path.
• FPV drone, a weather radio that reads out watches and warnings, and a repair station for the truck you just wrecked.
• The Atmosphere Sandbox. Put a tiny atmosphere inside a box, turn the knobs, and watch it go from clear sky to a supercell on a fast clock. Warm and cold front blocks let you force a squall line or a funnel whenever you want.

The hurricane hunter

A WC-130J weather plane. Its flight model was checked against a published study of the real aircraft, so it climbs, turns and stalls the way the real one does. Walk around the cargo bay while it flies, flip switches in the cockpit, put it on autopilot and drop sondes into a storm. Fly through a supercell and you’ll come back with hail dents and maybe a lightning strike. Fly into a hurricane and the whole plane shakes until you punch through the eyewall into the calm eye.

Space

Climb high enough and the air runs out. Up there is a real solar system: the Sun and all eight planets on proper orbits, moons included, and every body pulls on your ship at once. Flying works a lot like Kerbal Space Program, with a navball, SAS, time warp, maneuver nodes, a full-screen map and an autopilot for transfers.

You can land on the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Europa and Titan. Europa has an ocean under the ice and geysers that break through it, Titan has its own ocean life, and the gas giants are clouds all the way down. Beyond the Sun, the warp drive takes you to Alpha Centauri and Proxima, with planets of their own.

A pulsar and a black hole are out there too. Spawn one with a command, or go looking for them far out in the End. If one passes through the solar system, the planets’ orbits change for good.

Getting there:

• The RSP rocket. A multistage launcher with boosters, a fairing, a capsule and a satellite on top. The stages really separate, onboard cameras follow the flight, satellites stay in orbit and the capsule comes home on parachutes.
• Your own ship. Build one with Create Aeronautics and bolt one of three engines to it. Orion rides a chain of small nuclear blasts, Daedalus is a fusion torch, and the warp drive bends space to jump between planets and stars. Add docking ports, stage decouplers, fuel tanks and a flight computer. Every ship with a flight computer shows up on your tablet with its orbit, and you can take control of it from there.
• Spacewalks. Step outside, grab the hull and pull yourself along it.

Not sure where to start?

A small cloud buddy shows up and teaches you everything in 42 short voiced lessons, in English and Russian: driving, the radar, reading the sky, flying the plane, getting to orbit.

Performance

The clouds test your GPU on first launch and pick a preset that fits. Integrated graphics and older cards get a lighter one automatically, and if the shaders can’t compile at all, the mod quietly falls back to a simple renderer instead of crashing. There are five sharpness levels, plus adaptive quality that drops detail for a moment when your FPS dips. Unlimited FPS in the Performance tab takes Minecraft’s frame cap and VSync off in one click. It runs on laptops and old PCs, not just on gaming rigs.

For servers

Everything the mod does can be tuned in tornado7mod-common.toml, or from the chat with /t7m setting: it lists every setting, shows what each one does and what it may be, and saves the change. Turn space travel off (players already up there can still come down), keep the End free of black holes and pulsars, set how often earthquakes happen and how strong they get, which quakes make a tsunami and how long the coast rests between them, and much more.

Works with

None of these are required.

• Create Aeronautics and Sable. Tornadoes push, spin and tear apart physical builds. Wood comes apart, steel and stone mostly just shake. Ships float and ride the waves. The spaceship engines need these two.
• Vivecraft. Full VR. Fly the plane with your hands, hold the steering wheel, steer ships with the stick, even ski.

Controls

With the radar open: C tunes the laptop to the nearest DOW6, D opens the DOW6 console, F centers the scope on the truck, 1 2 3 4 switch between REFL, VEL, CC and DOW. The plane and the ships have their own keys, and the cloud buddy walks you through them.

Commands

Everything starts with /t7m.

Storms

• /t7m spawn tornado <ef> spawns a tornado that forms on its own, from ef0 to ef6, efm or dust_devil
• /t7m spawn tornado <ef> <shape> spawns one fully grown in the shape you pick (tab shows them all)
• /t7m spawn tornado <width> <windspeed> builds one to exact numbers
• /t7m spawn supercell spawns a supercell that may drop its own tornado
• /t7m spawn firetornado <radius> <windspeed> and /t7m fire <intensity> <radius> for fire
• /t7m cyclone <wind> spawns a hurricane, /t7m cyclone cat <0-5> by category, /t7m cyclone clear removes it
• /t7m tornado list, /t7m tornado dissipate, /t7m stop all, /t7m stop nearest
• /t7m tornado player <ef> turns you into the tornado
• /t7m clear clears everything at once

Sky and atmosphere

• /t7m weather shows the sounding where you stand, /t7m weather storm lets the atmosphere build its next storm right now
• /t7m weather atmos temp|dewpoint|stability|shear <value>, /t7m weather atmos show, /t7m weather atmos reset
• /t7m cloud <type> and /t7m cloud clear
• /t7m effect lightning|hail|rain|fog|gust|debris plays any weather effect on demand
• /t7m sim create|show|dial|scale|accel|remove|clear runs a mini atmosphere from the console
• /t7m radio watch|rotation|warning|allclear tests the radio
• /t7m eclipse list shows the eclipses ahead, /t7m eclipse go sun|moon jumps to the next one

Earth and sea

• /t7m quake <magnitude> sets off an earthquake right under you, /t7m quake natural on|off, /t7m quake stop, /t7m quake hazard shows how often the ground shakes here
• /t7m tsunami <height> starts a tsunami near you, /t7m tsunami stop
• /t7m sea wind <speed> <direction> and /t7m sea storm <strength> set the sea, /t7m sea rogue brings a rogue wave
• /t7m season set winter|spring|summer|autumn, /t7m season next <days>

Plane and space

• /t7m plane puts a plane in front of you, /t7m plane runway lays down a runway
• /t7m rocket puts the RSP rocket on a pad under you
• /t7m sky goto <planet> puts you in orbit around any planet or moon
• /t7m sky land moon|mars|europa puts you on the surface
• /t7m spawn black_hole and /t7m spawn pulsar, /t7m cosmic clear removes them

Server

• /t7m setting lists every server setting, /t7m setting <key> shows one, /t7m setting <key> <value> changes it (default puts it back)

Tornado shapes for the fast spawn: rope wire needle landspout cone v_shaped truncated_cone straight_sided cylinder concave convex cigar hourglass wedge bowl_shaped flared_base bulb sheathed barrel multi_vortex and a few more.

Found a bug or have an idea? Come say hi on our Discord. (https://discord.gg/ntWXudBUPa)