Weather Glass

🌧️ Rain · ❄️ Snow & frost · 🏜️ Dust storms · 💨 Breath on the glass · Minecraft pixel art · Client side

Weather Glass makes the weather show on your windows. When it rains, raindrops land on the outside of the glass, merge and run down leaving a wet trail. When it snows, frost creeps in from the edges of the window, snowflakes stick to the glass and snow piles up at the bottom. After a storm in the desert, sand settles along the frame. Get close to a frosted window and your breath fogs it up. All in pixel art that fits right into Minecraft.

✨ New in 0.5.0

For Minecraft 26.3 and 1.21.1, on Fabric and NeoForge.

• Vanilla detail: rain, snow and dust can now be drawn at 16 pixels per block, the same as Minecraft’s own textures, and that is the new default. The setting is called Detail: Vanilla (16x), Detailed (32x) or Very detailed (64x).
• Dust storms (beta): when a storm passes over a dry biome, sand settles on your windows. Red sand in the badlands.
• Particle Rain compatibility (beta): the drops and the sand on your windows follow Particle Rain’s wind, and its rain streaks stay off the glass.
• Drops cross the edges between glass blocks: on wide and tall windows they run on into the next block.
• A tidier settings screen: the same rows for rain, snow and dust, plain dark previews, beta features marked.
• Lighter: windows far away stand still, and nothing is drawn when the weather is clear and the glass is dry.

🌧️ Rain

• Drops of mixed sizes land on the side of the glass the rain reaches. When they get heavy they run down in jerks, pick up the drops in their way and leave a trail as wide as they are.
• A drop running out of a block goes on into the next one, sideways and down, so big windows read as one pane of glass.
• Glass under a short canopy (1-2 blocks) still gets wet, because rain falls at a slant. Under a deep porch it stays dry.
• After the rain the glass dries in about half a minute.
• Two styles: Drops (default) or Streaks, thin trickles running down.

❄️ Snow and frost

• In cold biomes (and high up in the mountains) frost grows in from the edges of the window, thicker in the corners. It grows more at night and while it snows, and slowly thaws again.
• Snowflakes stick to the glass while it snows and go one by one when it stops.
• Snow piles up at the bottom of the window, on the outside, heaped in the corners.
• Frost on the inside too, on windows that face the outside; it can be switched off.

💨 Breath on the glass

• Stand with your face close to a frosted window (inside or outside) and you breathe on it: a soft patch of fog grows there, one breath after another.
• Step back and it fades away in about five seconds.
• Only on cold glass, never in spectator mode, and it can be switched off.

🏜️ Dust storms (beta)

• When a storm passes over a dry biome (deserts, savannas, and the dry biomes of other mods), sand settles on the windows: along the frame, as a light patina on the glass, in grains, and heaped at the bottom.
• In the badlands the sand is red.
• An ordinary storm leaves some, a thunderstorm a lot; a few minutes after the storm the wind has taken it away.
• The dust textures are still being tested and can look a little buggy.

🌬️ Particle Rain (beta)

With Particle Rain installed, Weather Glass follows its wind:

• The windows facing the wind get more drops and more sand, the sheltered ones less, and the drops lean with the gusts.
• Particle Rain’s rain streaks are kept off the glass, where Weather Glass draws its own drops (they stay on the other blocks).
• A note in the chat tells you so the first time. The wind can be switched off in the settings: the windows even out again within a few seconds.

⚙️ Settings

In the settings screen (Mod Menu on Fabric, the Mods list on NeoForge), or in config/weatherglass.properties. The little windows at the top show the rain, the snow and the dust with your settings, live.

Rain

Snow

Dust storms

With Particle Rain installed there is one more switch, Wind of Particle Rain (On / Off).

Your settings from 0.4 carry over; new installs start at Vanilla.

🤝 Works with

• Every vanilla glass: glass blocks, glass panes, all stained glass and tinted glass.
• Sodium, Iris, Continuity (connected glass) and MoreCulling (tested on Fabric). With shader packs the drops take the pack’s own look of glass.
• Particle Rain (beta), on Fabric and NeoForge.
• Client side only: it works on any server, nothing to install there.

⚡ Performance

The weather is part of the glass’s own chunk mesh and is animated like vanilla’s animated textures, once a tick, straight into the block atlas: no extra render pass. It only runs while some glass nearby is wet or snowy, and windows more than a few chunks away stand still. While it rains: about 0.2 ms per tick at Vanilla, 0.4 ms at Detailed and 1.1 ms at Very detailed; nothing when the weather is clear and the glass is dry.

📦 Versions and requirements

• Fabric: Fabric Loader and Fabric API; Mod Menu (optional, for the settings screen)
• NeoForge: nothing else

⚠️ Known limitations

• The dust textures are still being tested and can look a little buggy; the Particle Rain wind is new too. Tell me if something looks off.
• Known bug: glass panes in groups of four can show a glitch with rain and snow. It is being fixed.
• If you build a roof over a window in another chunk section, the window keeps getting rain until its chunk is rebuilt.
• Not tested with Nvidium yet.

Questions, ideas or bugs? Come by on Discord.

A note, for honesty: I wrote this description in Italian and had AI translate and lay it out. AI also wrote part of the code, such as the rain simulation where the drops meet and merge, and the port from 26.3 to 1.21.1 (Fabric and NeoForge). So far I have only reviewed the code quickly: I’m a design student and right now I don’t have the time to go through all of it properly. When I do, updates will follow to fix or optimize whatever needs it. And the Vanilla (16x) look doesn’t fully convince me yet, so it may still change in later versions.