promotional bannermobile promotional banner

Thunderhead - Lightning & Thunder Overhaul

Cinematic lightning and thunder overhaul: procedural branching bolts, distant storm fronts, rolling thunder that lasts up to 15 seconds, shockwaves, ash scars and ball lightning.
Back to Files

[Fabric] Thunderhead 1.1.0

File namethunderhead-fabric-1.1.0.jar
Uploader
GestSeGestSe
Uploaded
Aug 16, 2026
Downloads
20
Size
758.1 KB
Mod Loaders
Fabric
File ID
8664231
Type
R
Release
Supported game versions
  • 1.21.1

Curse Maven Snippet

Fabric

modImplementation "curse.maven:thunderhead-1655148:8664231"

Learn more about Curse Maven

What's new

Thunderhead 1.1.0

Fixes for everything people reported, and an API other mods can build on.

Fixed

  • Effects no longer draw through terrain. Lightning, particles and glow could appear in front of the world instead of behind it. None of the mod's render passes were asking for a depth test at all — they inherited whatever the previous pass happened to leave switched on.
  • Thunder no longer cuts off. Ten of the thirteen clips ended while the sound was still going, the worst of them at a sixth of full volume, which is a click rather than an ending. Every clip now fades out properly.
  • No more black squares. A strike that landed over a gap, off a cliff or onto a glass roof threw up plain black debris, because those surfaces report no colour at all. Most visible with a lot of strikes at once.
  • Ball lightning is the same sphere for everybody. Its shape, sparks and pulse were rolled separately on each client, so two players standing together watched two different spheres.
  • Ball lightning no longer restarts when you walk up to it. Arriving halfway through its life showed it newly born, at full brightness, with its fade arriving seconds late.
  • Ball lightning glides between position updates instead of stepping.
  • The ball lightning burst is audible again. It used a vanilla sound the mod itself suppresses, so anyone running Thunderhead watched it burst in silence while vanilla clients heard it.
  • No more double damage above a strike. Standing four to nine blocks above one took both vanilla's damage and the mod's; the near-miss ring now excludes vanilla's real damage box.
  • Cosmetic lightning is harmless again. The bolt from a skeleton horse trap — and anything a datapack spawns for show — no longer deals near-miss damage. It still flashes.
  • Two players can no longer disagree about which entity a bolt hit.
  • The gameplay config is re-read when a server starts on NeoForge, matching Fabric.

New: an API for other mods

Thunderhead now has a small client-side API. A mod can:

  • raise its own lightning anywhere, and decide where it starts — which fixes the bolt's angle and its length, so a channel can lean hard, run flat between two towers or rise from the ground
  • style it: thickness, branching, reach, and arbitrary RGB colour for the core and the glow
  • choose its thunder — which clip, how loud, how long after the flash, or silent entirely
  • restrict which debris it throws up
  • start a rolling thunder event on its own, with no lightning in front of it
  • spawn ball lightning from server-side code
  • listen for every strike Thunderhead draws, including vanilla ones

It degrades to a no-op when Thunderhead is absent, so an optional integration cannot crash its host.

Accessibility is deliberately out of reach: nothing in the API can raise brightness, change the flicker or touch the reduced-flashing mode.

📖 API reference, Gradle coordinates and examples

Notes

Nothing in your config changes and no world data is touched. Drop the new jar in and go.