🌊 Sable Waves — A Living Ocean for Minecraft

The sea is no longer flat. Sable Waves turns Minecraft's ocean into a real, moving, breathing thing — waves you can see, swells that rock your ships, storms that mean something, and wind that fills your sails. Built on the Sable physics engine, it works automatically with anything Sable simulates — including every Create: Aeronautics ship.

The crest you watch rolling toward your ship is the exact crest that lifts it. Physics and visuals run on one deterministic wave simulation — no desync, no faking it.

⚓ Features

Visible, physics-synced waves

A translucent, foam-capped wave surface is drawn over the ocean, computed from the same 8-component Gerstner wave field the physics uses. Biome-tinted water (warm ocean teal, cold ocean navy), white crest foam, smooth slope-based sun shading, and soft edge fading. Works with or without shaders.

A sea that answers to the sky

Calm days carry a gentle swell. Rain builds the sea; thunderstorms raise heavy rolling waves over about a minute, then let them die back down when the sky clears. Wave height follows real oceanography (Pierson–Moskowitz wind scaling, deep-water dispersion).

A sea that answers to the moon

Spring tides at full and new moon bring noticeably bigger seas than the quarter-moon neaps, and the sea breathes with a twice-daily tidal rhythm — sail on a full-moon night during a storm at your own risk.

Rogue seas — the Drake Passage update

Every couple of minutes the open ocean rolls a hidden dice. On a 1-in-45 hit, the sea turns monstrous for about two minutes — 2.3× waves and howling wind, ramping in and out like a real squall. Deep water only…

Depth shoaling

…because waves lose their power as the sea floor rises. Harbors, rivers, and beaches stay calm; the full fury lives out past the drop-off. Waves visibly shrink toward shore.

Ships that feel all of it

Any Sable craft or Create: Aeronautics ship heaves, pitches, and rolls on the swell. Crests genuinely lift the hull, wave surge pushes ships along the wave direction, and hydrodynamic damping plus a configurable roll stabilizer keep heavy seas thrilling instead of fatal. (Set rollStabilization to 0 if you want realistic capsizing.)

Sails ⛵

Wool is canvas. Any exposed wool on a Sable craft catches the wind and pulls the ship — more canvas, more thrust, and tall rigs heel over in a gale. Trim your sail plan by adding or removing wool; ships re-read their rigging every few seconds. Default hull speed ~7 m/s, fully configurable.

Wakes, breakers, spray & sound

Moving ships throw bow spray, streak foam down their sides, drag a widening wake behind the stern, and kick up a rooster tail at full speed. Swells crash on shallow shores with spray, foam, and bubbles. And the ocean is loud: breakers boom on the beach, water washes along moving hulls, and storm seas roar with wind — all vanilla sounds, no resource pack needed.

ProtoManly's Weather integration 🌪️

With ProtoManly's Weather (0.16.4) and PMWeatherAPI installed, its real atmospheric wind field drives your sails — sail the edge of a supercell and feel its inflow in your rigging. Completely optional soft dependency; without it, the built-in wind model takes over seamlessly.

📦 Requirements

Mod	Needed?
Minecraft 1.21.1 + NeoForge	Required
Sable 2.0+	Required
Create: Aeronautics	Optional — ships supported automatically
ProtoManly's Weather 0.16.4 + PMWeatherAPI	Optional — storm winds drive sails (note: PMWeather is incompatible with Iris)

⚙️ Configuration

Everything lives in config/sablewaves.json (auto-created, auto-migrated). Highlights:

waveIntensity, baseSwell, maxWaveAmplitude — how big the sea gets
heaveMultiplier — how hard crests lift your ship
stormSeverity, maxAccelerationG, rollStabilization — how deadly storms are
rogueSeaChance, rogueSeaIntensity, rogueSeaDurationMinutes — the Drake Passage dial
sailForceCoefficient, maxSailSpeed — your rigging
waveOverlayEnabled, waveOverlayRange, waveOverlayDetail, waveOverlayOpacity — the visible sea
crestParticles, wakesEnabled, shoreBreakersEnabled, oceanSoundsEnabled, soundVolume — effects & audio

🧭 Quick start

Download Sablewaves
Sail something onto open water — it will start rocking immediately.
Stick a mast of wool/sail on it and watch the wind take over.
Run /weather thunder, wait a minute, and hold on.
(optionally if pmweather is installed) Run /pmweather and let your inner storm take over

⚠️ Good to know

Wave troughs show the flat vanilla surface (the overlay draws on top of vanilla water; it can't carve it away).
The wave overlay is smooth-shaded color, slightly stylized rather than textured — and it happily coexists with Iris/shader packs.
Multiplayer-friendly: the sea is deterministic, so every player sees the same ocean with zero sync traffic.

Sablewaves