What does this mod do?
This mod has three main features:
1. When flying with elytra, the player will fly faster the higher they fly (similar as in real life, where air density is lower at high altitudes, decreasing air drag).
2. Adds additional cloud layers indicating when flight speed starts to increase and when it ceases to increase, acting as a reference point for height and speed.
3. Features 1 and 2 are FULLY customizable: you can add and setup as many cloud layers as you want, and modify extra flight speed or disable it altogether.
Important: right now both ModMenu and ClothConfig are required to access to the configuration screen.
More insight into the mod
Elytra flying
If you are like me, a player who likes to explore the world, and travel very far away from the spawn to find unique generation and breathtaking landscapes to build your base and farms around, you might end up with your buildings spreaded across a 30,000-block-wide world.
The average player would be smart and link everything with a nether highway system. But I personally find elytra travelling very enjoyable, and for an endgame item which purpose is to specifically make travelling more convenient, it lacks utility when it is used in long-distance travel.
The premise behind this mod is to make elytra travel more useful when covering large distances, making the player move at airplane speeds when flying at airplane heights.
When using Elytra Aeronautics with default settings, flight speed increases with altitude following this curve:
As you can see, speed increment is very low from y=0 to y=250.
This is to not make low altitude flight go easily out of control, again, if you are like me and use the elytra to travel just 20 blocks across your base, you don't have to worry about reaching MACH5 when going for some potatoes.
Beyond the 250 blocks of altitude mark, flight speed increases exponentially up to its maximum at y=1000. At this altitude, speed at a constant 0° angle to the ground is around 250 block/second, matching commercial flight average speed.
Keeping it vanilla
When developing a mod my intention is to make everything feel as vanilla as possible, since I make mods for myself that put in the game features that I feel are missing, to later use in my own survival worlds, this time I took a step further and published it.
When making this one I came across a problem: "How could I make some sort of altimeter AND speedometer without adding fancy items or any GUI?", because some kind of guide is needed when flying far up from the ground, and using the debug (F3) screen is not very immersive.
After giving it some thought, I got an idea: using clouds as some kind of reference point for the player's vertical position.
By default, Elytra Aeronautics adds two additional cloud layers, one at the middle point of the speed curve (y=250) and another at the end of the speed curve (y=1000); these serve as an altitude marker like previously mentioned and as a speed marker, as these will appear moving faster relative to the player when travelling at high speeds.
This leads me to the second and third features of the mod, clouds and customization.
Clouds and customization
Using the config screen you can add as many cloud layers as you wish, and use different cloud types and render distances for each layer individually.
"How did we get here?"
Furthermore, this mod adds "LOD clouds", these clouds will render as "Fast clouds" when far away from them, and as "Fancy clouds" when close to them.
You can even make it so when a cloud layer is far away enough from the player it stops rendering, so you can set up hundreds of cloud layers and lose almost no performance.
As previously mentioned you can either configure each layer individually, or all of them at once, providing full access to the additional cloud functionality of the mod.
Integration
ModMenu (3.0.1 or higher) -> required to access config screen.
ClothConfig (0.6.0 or higher) -> required to build config screen.
(Expect ModMenu not being a mandatory requirement for accesing the config screen in a future version)
Compatibility
- Some mods that change cloud height may make cloud placement work a little bit strange.
- This mod is still pretty new so, if you find any issue, please let me know.
Future development
- Expect the mod to be ported to future versions, and major bugs to be patched as soon as possible.
- Expansion updates are planned but I don't have that much time, so those might take longer to be released. Some planned features include: more cloud customization, an altimeter item (for those who play with no clouds), and new sky effects.
F.A.Q
Will this ever be ported to Forge?
Nope, sorry I don't work with Forge and most likely never will.
Can I port it to Forge?
Yes, you can, but you have to respect the mod's license and credit the original work.
Will this mod be ever ported to an older version?
Right now, I can almost assure you that I won't, but, if I see a lot of people requesting it, I might make a single version for each of the most requested older MC versions.
Contact
- If any issue is found is preferable to report it via the "Issues" section in the mod's GitHub repository.
- You can also join the mod's discord server, but be aware the server is still very WIP.
Known issues
- Using firework rockets resets flight speed to 33 blocks/second, firework rockets can still be used to propell the player to the uppermost layers but in order to gain speed gliding is required. (high priority in the to-be-fixed list)
- Upwards momentum can be infitely harnessed at high speeds (working on fixing this right now)
- Certain setups of the speed curve might lead to strange flight behaviour, I will work on making the curve adapt better to certain values, specially when two of the parameters have the same value, which may be responsible of reported crashes (working on this right now as well)
- (Due to how Minecraft works) in some cases the game resets flight altogether when flying at high speeds, I still have to reproduce this but it is a known issue, disabling the gamerule "doElytaFlight" might help preventing that, but I cannot confirm it yet. (hight priority on the fix list)
- Minor problems with cloud rendering, I also aim to make cloud configuration more clear when setting up all clouds at once (I will work on this after the above is solved)
Support
You can support me by simply downloading the mod and sharing it with friends!
Are you planning 1.18.2?
How have you solved the issue of lag? Wouldn't going at 250m/s load hundreds of chunks and completely destroy the server's TPS?
If we do a little bit of math, 250 blocks are 15.625 chunks, if we say that the player's render distance is set to 16, that's a total of 33 chunks (16 in each direction + the central one the player is in), 33 * 15.625 = 515.625, that divided by 20 is 25.78125.
That means that a player flying at maximum speed would load over 500 chunks a second, or about 26 chunks a tick, which is very insane and even the best computers will absolutely struggle to keep it up. Did you somehow make it so the chunks unload if you get high enough?
just wanted to say, super cool concept and execution. i enjoyed reading through your explanation.
wish there were more mods that applied your philosophy
In reply to smegmaman1:
Thank you! I am a big fan of game design, whenever I design a mod I try to make it feel balanced and in place, your comment is the best compliment I could receive ^^
Is this compatible with Icarus?
In reply to korin78:
Right now, it isn't, you can use this mod along with Icarus to get the extra clouds functionality, but I am afraid elytra flight won't properly work. In a future, after I get some time and finish polishing a couple of things, I might get a look at integration with Icarus.
Please port to forge! :D
In reply to welpstudent:
I'm sorry, but as I said in the F.A.Q. I won't be doing forge ports myself, although, I allow this mod to be ported to forge by others, so giving it some time, it might catch the eye of an interested forge modder.