Weather

Weather shipped in protocol v70. Rain is regional — the world is baked into a handful of climates, each climate is cut into a few “sectors,” and each sector independently decides when it rains and for how long. Only the ground under a rain cell gets dimmed, wet and loud — the whole map doesn’t change at once, and there’s no drifting cloud animation; a cell sits still and just fades in and out over time.

How climates are assigned

Every plot gets a fixed climate baked from the world’s terrain data at generation time — it’s not random and it never changes mid-game:

Climate	Rough rule
Wet coast	within 1 km of the sea and below 900 m elevation
Rain shadow	a ridge at least 1,200 m tall spanning 1+ km north–south sits within 14 km upwind (west), with no sea in between, and the plot itself is below 700 m
Alpine	1,500 m elevation or higher (worldgen paints permanent snow from 1,800 m up)
Temperate	everywhere else on land

The sea never gets rain.

How often, and for how long

Each climate’s sectors roll independently for when it rains, for how long, and how wide. Roughly what it feels like:

Climate	Average frequency	Rain duration	Cell radius
Wet coast	about every 1.2h	21–30 min	1.6–2.6 km
Temperate	about every 4h	15–30 min	3.5–5.4 km
Rain shadow	about every 14h	15–22 min	3.0–4.6 km
Alpine	about every 2.3h	22–30 min	3.3–5.2 km

Cell edges are sharp — rain is at full strength out to 70% of the radius and fades to zero over the outer 30%, rather than bleeding out gradually the way real rain does, so the circle you’d see on a map is exactly where it’s raining. The rain shadow rains least on average, but with cells reaching 3–5 km it still gets soaked by spillover from neighboring climates, so it’s never bone dry.

The world map doesn’t show cells or a forecast yet — that layer has been prototyped and works, but it’s held back until there’s a real gameplay reason for players to check the weather ahead of time.

What rain does on screen

The ground under a cell reflects three things in real time, and reverts immediately once you leave it:

• Dimmer lighting — directional light drops up to 50%, ambient and environment light up to 25%, at full cloud cover. Full overcast reads as “cloudy afternoon,” never night.
• Rain and sound — ground-level rain particles and splash rings appear, along with rain ambience and occasional distant thunder, following your SFX volume/mute settings and muffled indoors. It never rains indoors or in dungeons, and flower petal particles stop spawning while it’s raining.
• Quieter inn music — bard performances duck through the same quiet-zone system rain uses, so the music fades smoothly instead of cutting in and out at a cell’s edge.

Getting soaked in the rain (protocol v78)

It’s not just wading anymore — standing in the rain long enough now gets you wet too. At full intensity (1.0) it takes 10 in-game minutes (75 real seconds) of continuous rain to trigger; half intensity takes twice as long. Intensity at or below 0.02 doesn’t accumulate at all. The server checks your exact position’s weather once per second — you don’t need to be moving, and your graphics settings don’t matter. An admin-forced rain counts too.

Going indoors (a ground-floor room’s actual footprint, not the gaps between rooms), into a dungeon, upstairs, dying, or loading resets your accumulated exposure. If you’re already wet and keep getting rained on, your remaining time refreshes back to 450 seconds once it drops below 300 — the same goes for wading first and then getting rained on. Taking shelter doesn’t dry you off instantly; an active Wet debuff just runs down at its normal rate, or faster next to a lit campfire.

Rain-triggered Wet has the exact same effect as wading (×0.83 move speed, ×1.5 armor weight) — see Combat’s debuffs.

What rain does to the ground (protocol v78)

• Puddles — flat ground gradually grows irregular puddles as rain accumulates; at 45% accumulation the ground darkens by 38%. Puddles shrink from their edges once rain stops, fully drying within 240 seconds, and refill if it starts raining again. Slopes and terrain below sea level never puddle, and dungeon floors stay dry.
• Lit-up rain — raindrops and ground splashes now pick up the color and distance falloff of nearby light sources (torches, campfires); above 0.45 rain intensity, the sparse light-rain ambience crossfades into the full heavy-rain recording.
• Lightning (toggleable) — above 0.35 intensity, the sky occasionally flashes — the scene lights up for 50ms then fades back to the normal day/night lighting, with thunder following 2–5 seconds later, roughly every 50–140 seconds. It reads weaker indoors. Settings → Lightning Flashes is on by default and can be turned off independently of rain and thunder audio.

Seasons, but only in western Valdran (protocol v78)

Rain chance now varies by season, but only within 6 km of the village of Aldermark (6–8 km is a blend zone back to the normal schedule); everywhere else keeps its original, season-independent schedule:

Season	Rough dates	Rain-chance multiplier	Village wet-time share
Winter	Dec 30 – Mar 29	×1.0	about 37%
Spring	Mar 30 – Jun 29	smoothly ×1.0 → ×0.11	about 21% (average)
Summer	Jun 30 – Sep 29	×0.11	about 5%
Autumn	Sep 30 – Dec 29	smoothly ×0.11 → ×1.0	about 21% (average)

The yearly average wet-time share is about 21%, down more than 40% from the 36.7% it was before seasons existed. Rain elsewhere in the world isn’t affected.

NPCs duck out of the rain

Wick (the night-market vendor) and Signe (the town-square performer) both pack up and head into the inn once rain intensity passes 0.02 at their usual outdoor spot (Wick sits in chair 42, Signe in chair 39), and resume their normal schedule once it clears. Sleeping, meals, and other indoor routines aren’t affected.

Admins can force the weather

Server admins have chat commands — /weather rain [intensity], /weather clear, and /weather auto — to force server-wide rain or clear skies, or resume automatic weather, for debugging or events. Regular players don’t see these commands, but weather forced this way behaves exactly like natural rain for lighting, sound, and the Wet debuff.

Not in yet

Snow, weather-affected fishing, and a forecast layer on the world map are still missing.