Weather & time

Local weather, lightning, forecasting, local time and sleeping are in 0.6.0. Seasons, distant storm clouds and rain that follows the mountains are only in the development build and are marked new below.

Modules: Hard Hoof: Environment (weather), Hard Hoof: Core (time), Hard Hoof: Portals (planets).

On a Hard Hoof planet the weather and the time of day belong to the place you stand. Storms form, drift along the wind and die out, so it can pour on one hill and be dry on the next. Noon travels round the planet with the sun, so it can be day for you and night on the far side. Nothing here destroys your builds, and a night is never skipped.

Weather runs on every Hard Hoof planet (Tall, Classic and Dimension Creator worlds). Local time runs on planets of 128 chunks or more; on a smaller one it is one time everywhere. Vanilla dimensions keep vanilla weather and time.

Storms

Each planet keeps a field of weather systems built from its climate: warm, wet, rising air makes storms; wind belts steer them; ranges wring rain out of them.

Storm	What it is
Thunderstorm	A core about 120 blocks across that lives 4 to 8 minutes, with lightning. Common on warm afternoons.
Shower	Small and short, no thunder.
Squall line	Heavy rain, gusts and thunder along a cold front.
Rain band	A broad band of steady rain.
Snow band	Heavy snow in a gale. A blizzard where the ground is snowy.

• Wind belts: trade winds blow from the east near the equator, westerlies in the mid-latitudes, polar easterlies near the poles, with calm bands at about 30 and 60 degrees. Storms ride them.
• Rain or snow: it falls as snow where the air is cold enough (below about 1 degree C) and the biome lets anything fall. Deserts stay dry.
• Speed: storms travel at true-to-life pace, a fraction of a block a second, so a walker can outrun one. The weather_speed rule changes that.
• Under rain (and only under it): farmland is watered, fires go out, cauldrons fill, fish bite faster, undead do not burn, bees stay home, riptide and Channeling work, and monsters can spawn by day under thunder. Walk out of the storm and it stops at its edge.
• Blizzards close the view to a whiteout and pile snow, up to a set depth that then settles back. Snow never buries anything: it is laid only in air or snow, and torch-lit ground stays clear.
• Distant clouds (new): storm banks are drawn out to about 1,500 blocks, across the planet's seam too. You can see a storm coming and judge its bearing.
• Rain follows the mountains (new): moist air climbing a range strengthens a storm's rain on the windward side, and descending air weakens it in the lee, so ranges make wet coasts and dry rain shadows. The rain that falls feeds the basins and rivers of Water.

Lightning

Lightning is bright and loud and harms nothing you built.

• A mature thunderstorm strikes a few times a minute, only in loaded chunks. Bolts go for a lightning rod within 128 blocks, otherwise the most exposed living thing.
• It never starts a fire, changes a block, scrapes copper, turns mobs into other mobs (apart from charging a creeper), or hurts animals, villagers or pets. It still powers lightning rods, so redstone that uses them works.
• A player it picks is warned first: two to three seconds of sparks, buzzing and a subtitle. If you step under a roof the bolt picks again. A warned hit cannot take you below one heart.
• Thunder arrives after the flash, about a chunk a second, from the bolt's direction, with a subtitle such as "Thunder, 6 s, NW". Count the seconds: five or fewer, get inside.
• Lightning you make yourself (Channeling, /summon, spells) stays vanilla.

The sky flashes softly, at most three times a second, and a client option sets how bright the flash is.

Seasons (new)

A planet can have an axial tilt and a year. A new world has them on by default: Earth's tilt of 23 degrees and a 96-day year, which is twelve of the planet's 8-day moons. In Create World > Customize, the Seasons and Year rows change them.

• Summer days are long and winter days short. Near the poles you get a midnight sun and a polar night, and the south's seasons are the north's reversed. The tilt fades to nothing inside the polar caps, so the seam where the two poles meet stays sane.
• Storm belts swing toward the summer pole. Thunderstorms peak in summer and snow bands come toward the equator in winter.
• Snow and ice melt on planets in air above 2 degrees C, and water freezes only below 0.

Telling the time and the weather

Weather is read, never announced.

Tool	Tells you
Barometer	Pressure, its three-hour trend in words (falling slowly, falling quickly) and a forecast from looking upwind.
Wind Vane	Swings into the wind and names its force and where the low lies. Recipe: Arrow, Copper Ingot, Stick in a column.
The Plumb	Shows the barometer's forecast beside the pressure.
World map, 2	The weather now, live: rain, snow, thunder, cloud, wind, highs and lows, each storm's heading. See The world map.
Weather app	A rain radar and forecast on a Terminal. Volt programs read sys.weather(), sys.radar(r) and sys.lightning().

The map shows the weather now, not tomorrow's. Storms grow and die as they go.

Local time

East is ahead. The planet has one clock, and the hour at your longitude is the clock plus your distance east of spawn. Cross the planet and you cross the day.

Planet	One local hour is	The night edge moves west at
128 chunks	85 blocks	about 1.7 blocks a second
256	171 blocks	3.4
512 (Tall default)	341 blocks	6.8
1,024	683 blocks	13.7

• The sky, fog, clouds, the clock item and the Terminal clock all follow the local hour.
• Mobs, spawners and villagers use the local time and the local darkness. Two zombies far apart can differ: one burns, the other does not. A storm darkens only the ground under it.
• Far terrain is shaded by its own local hour, so dusk is a soft line across the distance.
• Date line: at the east-west seam the day number and the moon phase step back a day when you go east, as at Earth's date line. Spawn sits near the middle, so the line is on the far side of the world.
• /time set day makes it day where you stand. /hardhoof time shows your local time and the planet clock.

Sleeping

A bed sets your spawn, by day or night. It does not skip the night, even if everyone lies down.

• You can lie down at local night. Five seconds asleep counts as rest, which keeps phantoms away.
• A "Dawn in m:ss" overlay counts down, and you wake at local 06:00. You can get up at any time.
• The straw bed is a nap bed: it gives rest at any hour and never sets spawn.
• Sleeping no longer clears the weather, and players_sleeping_percentage does nothing.

Game rules and options

Rule	Default	Does
hardhoof_environment:local_weather	on	Off gives planets vanilla weather.
hardhoof_environment:lightning	1	0 never targets players, 1 warned, 2 vanilla lightning with fire and damage.
hardhoof_environment:blizzard_snow_depth	3	Layers a blizzard piles, 0 to 8.
hardhoof_environment:storm_frequency	100	Percent of Earth's storm rate, 0 to 400. 0 turns storms off.
hardhoof_environment:weather_speed	100	Storm speed as a percent of true to life, 50 to 500.

advance_weather false freezes the weather. Client options (Mods > Hard Hoof: Environment > Config): sky flash brightness, whiteout strength, rain and snow density, rain and wind volume, and thunder subtitles.

Operators: /weather clear|rain|thunder acts around you (clear dissolves storms within 1,024 blocks; rain and thunder start one that then drifts). /hardhoof weather list, spawn <kind>, clear [radius|all] and forecast go further. Kinds are thunderstorm, shower, squall, snow_band and rain_band.

Not built yet

• Floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and other weather that damages the surface are designed, with warnings and defences, but not built. The groundwork (a damage framework with natural_hazards and hazard_grace_days rules, and presence claims on the map) exists.
• Fog, dust storms and hail.
• Far rain shafts and far flashes, and views through portals showing the far side's sky.