Windswept Waters

Windswept Waters

Vanilla water just sits there. Oceans are flat, rivers don’t take you anywhere, and a waterfall is basically a ladder you can’t climb. This mod fixes that.

Every day gets its own wind

When a new day starts, the wind gets rolled — a strength from 0 to 10, and a direction. Most days come out somewhere in the middle. Now and then you’ll get a dead calm, and now and then you’ll get a proper gale, and those days feel different.

Weather makes it worse. Rain or snow adds a bit. A thunderstorm adds a lot. Getting caught out at sea in a storm is genuinely a bad time now.

The wind is worked out from your world seed and the day number, so it’s the same for everyone on a server, it survives restarts, and it doesn’t save anything to your world file.

Water goes where it should

Two things push water around.

There’s the water’s own momentum — it thins out as it spreads, exactly like it always has, and it picks up speed for every block it falls. Stand at the bottom of a tall waterfall and you’ll feel the difference.

Then there’s the wind, dragging the open sea along its heading. That’s the part that makes oceans stop feeling like a flat blue floor.

When those two disagree, they fight. A river running straight into the wind can end up going nowhere at all.

Wind loses its grip as you go deeper, so you can duck under a choppy surface and find calm down below. It also can’t get at water with a roof over it — dig a pond in a cave and it stays a pond.

What it actually feels like

The water moves and you move with it. Swimming upstream costs you; swimming downstream is free speed. At its absolute worst the sea does about 2 blocks a second, which is enough to be annoying but never enough to trap you.

Some other bits:

• Hold sneak to dig in and hold your position
• Empty boats get shoved around; one with someone in it handles better
• Fish don’t care. They live there.

You can see it

Flow isn’t invisible. White flecks skate along the surface so you can tell which way a river is going from the bank. Streaks blow through the air so you can read the wind before you get in the water. And the little specks you see underwater now drift along with the current instead of hanging there.

Knobs

Everything’s in the config. /windswept tells you what the water is doing right where you’re standing — the day’s roll, the weather, the wind’s heading, the flow level, the speed. /wind 10 cranks it to maximum if you don’t want to wait for a storm.

Needs Fabric API. Minecraft 26.2.