Better Simple Clouds

1.2.0

A large update. The NeoForge 1.21.1 and Forge 1.20.1 builds now have the same features and the same options.

Distant Horizons

• Clouds work with Distant Horizons: they are hidden behind LOD terrain, their render distance can follow DH's (or a percentage of it) with the cloud field growing to reach it, and the distant rain is drawn over loaded chunks and LODs alike.
• A shader pack and Distant Horizons can now be used together with Simple Clouds (Iris on 1.21.1, Oculus on 1.20.1). Simple Clouds on its own switches its clouds off for that combination.

Shader packs

• New Shader Fog on Clouds (on by default): clouds are drawn after the shader pack, so its fog never reached them and far clouds stood crisp in front of hazy terrain. Far clouds now fade into the sky and haze the pack drew, and the distant rain fades with them. Shader Fog Reach sets how near the camera the fade begins.
• With Distant Horizons, the distant rain now stops at terrain and LODs instead of being drawn over them.

Clouds

• Cloud Smoothing: the coarse far rings are meshed with smaller cubes that follow the real cloud shape, so distant clouds no longer look like stairs. Clouds near you keep their chunky cubes by default; Smooth Cube Size smooths them too if you want that.
• Small Cloud Detail: distant small clouds are meshed finer instead of collapsing into one or two giant cubes.
• New world options: cloud scale, cloud height, spawn radius and density.
• Downpour Rain: a dense field of short falling streaks instead of Simple Clouds' sparse rain ribbons, with density, radius and streak-count options.
• Cloud fog thins out as you climb far above the clouds.

Performance

• New Sync-Free Mesh Path (on by default): cloud meshes are built without waiting on GPU read-backs and all cloud chunks are drawn in one call.
• New options: cloud mesh updates per second, staggered far-ring updates, a cloud shadow map interval, and skipping the distant-rain passes while no storm is near.

Forge 1.20.1

• Brought up to the 1.21.1 build; it was last updated in September. The video options are in Embeddium's video settings: 65 options on 10 pages under "Better Simple Clouds".
• With Oculus, Distant Horizons and a shader pack, clouds and the distant rain no longer draw over nearby terrain.

Requires Simple Clouds 0.7.3. Optional: Sodium / Embeddium (options pages), Iris / Oculus, Distant Horizons.