Gale
- By
Minecraft wind physics such as waving leaves & foliage with little impact to performance.
Gale
Gale is the wind mod of the Atmosphera suite for Minecraft 1.20.1 on Forge. Leaves, plants, hanging blocks and water plants sway with one shared, weather-driven wind, without a shaderpack: the motion is computed in the terrain shaders the game already runs, with nothing added to the frame's geometry.
Client-only. Gale is never required on a server and never blocks joining one. It needs AtmospheraLib, and it steps aside when a shaderpack replaces the terrain shaders.
Features
This is the feature set Gale will have when its roadmap is complete. Items marked † are open design questions: each ends in a written go/no-go and ships only if it passes.
Wind
- One wind for the whole world. A deterministic sum of sines driven by the shared clock, strengthened by rain and thunder, and layered with biome openness and altitude. Every sway frequency completes a whole number of cycles per wrap, so there is never a visible jump.
- A wind other mods can read. The wind is available on the CPU, so particles, falling leaves and weather mods can follow the same wind that moves the trees. Torrente's waves line up with it.
- Rain that leans. Rain streaks tilt with the wind.
Foliage and plants
- Leaves, plants and water plants each get their own sway class, anchored at the base so a block never leaves its root.
- Leaf flutter. Leaves near the camera flicker slightly in the light, as if turning in the wind, kept below 10 Hz so it never reads as flicker.
- Distant foliage. LODs get the same offset in the transition band, a fade by pixel footprint, and a canopy shimmer beyond it.
- Entity bending. Grass and flowers bend away from nearby moving entities with a smooth radial falloff, and can spring back over time.
- Shelter. Plants under canopies and roofs, or deep in valleys, sway less, using the world's own column data.
Hanging blocks
- Swing like real objects. Lanterns, chains, vines, weeping and cave vines, and hanging roots respond to the wind as driven, damped oscillators: they lag a gust, overshoot and settle, and their quick flutter fades while the slow swing grows.
- Chain lever arm†. Long chains and vines swing more the further they hang from their anchor, with a depth rule that is identical on both sides of a chunk-section boundary.
Everything else
- Per-class tuning. Sway amount and speed, hanging swing and leaf flutter are separate options, and most apply live.
- Shaderpack aware. When a shaderpack replaces the terrain programs, Gale turns its features off and logs why, while the wind itself keeps running for other mods.
- No cost at meshing. A block's wave class is cached on the block state, so the whole feature is a field read when chunks are built.
Performance
Gale adds almost nothing to a frame. Its budgets are the suite's: 0.6 ms of GPU time in total for every Atmosphera mod at 1440p, 0.1 ms of render-thread CPU per frame, and at most 5 % of chunk meshing for all hooks together.
The figures below are the project's own measurements, taken with the in-repo scenes and tools on the RatPack 2.9 test client, an RX 7900 XTX, at 2560x1440 uncapped, with a 64 x 64 field of grass, vines and two-layer oak canopy. Only AMD hardware has been tested. Anything that may behave differently on NVIDIA or Intel is unverified.
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Frame rate, without Gale / with Gale (0.1.3) | 314 / 323 fps median (GPU-bound, within noise) |
| GPU, terrain pass | +0.016 ms (0.254 → 0.270 ms); GPU frame span 3.18 → 3.14 ms (within noise) |
| Sync | no OpenGL calls of its own; the wind is one vec4 per frame |
| CPU, terrain pass, render thread | 0.146 → 0.145 ms (no change) |
| CPU, chunk meshing | Gale's own share 1.5 % → 0.2 % (0.1.8 → 0.1.9); all Atmosphera hooks together 1.8 %, against the 5 % budget |
Roadmap
| Release | Theme | Content |
|---|---|---|
| 0.1.x | Foundation | Weather-driven wind, sway for leaves, plants and hanging blocks, LOD canopy, cheaper meshing |
| 0.2.x | Response (current: 0.2.1) | Hanging blocks as oscillators, leaf flutter, wind axes from AtmospheraLib |
| 0.3.0 | Contact | Entity bending, shelter from the column field, chain lever arm† |
| 0.4.0 | Weather | Rain streaks that lean with the wind |
Bridges for Falling Leaves Forged and Atmospherics are small changes in those mods and are tracked outside this repository. Dates are not promised. Each feature release is a minor version (0.X.0). Version 1.0.0 is only used when the project is declared complete.
Requirements
- Minecraft 1.20.1 with Forge 47.x
- Java 17 or newer
- AtmospheraLib 0.6.1 or newer
- An Embeddium-based terrain renderer (developed and tested with Xenon 0.3.31)
Installation
- Install AtmospheraLib and an Embeddium-based terrain renderer.
- Place
gale-<version>-mc1.20.1-forge.jarinmods. - Options are in the Atmosphera tab of Video Settings, and in
config/SolConfig/atmosphera/.
Building
./gradlew :Gale:build
Gale builds from the Atmosphera Gradle multi-project: the four repositories checked out side by side under one root that holds settings.gradle, gradle.properties and the wrapper. It needs a JDK 17 and writes Gale/build/libs/gale-<version>-mc1.20.1-forge.jar.
Licence and attribution
- Gale is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 only (
LICENSE). Copyright (C) 2026 SolarBiscuit. - Additional terms under GPL-3.0 section 7 are in
NOTICE. Every copy or substantial portion that you distribute, original or modified, must keep that notice and credit "SolarBiscuit" with a link to https://github.com/SolarBiscuit/Gale. A modified version must be clearly marked as modified, and must not be presented as the original work or under its name and author without that marking. - The Gale jar bundles no third-party libraries. It is built against Minecraft, Forge and AtmospheraLib, which are not redistributed with it.
- Gale is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by Mojang Studios, Microsoft, Minecraft Forge or the authors of the mods it works with.
Reporting issues
Issues belong in the Gale issue tracker. Please include the Gale and AtmospheraLib versions, your renderer and shaderpack (if any), your GPU and driver, and latest.log. The output of /atmosphera status helps.
Gale Team
