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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.
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[Neoforge] Thunderhead 1.1.0

File namethunderhead-neoforge-1.1.0.jar
Uploader
GestSeGestSe
Uploaded
Aug 16, 2026
Downloads
55
Size
752.9 KB
Mod Loaders
NeoForge
File ID
8664239
Type
R
Release
Supported game versions
  • 1.21.1

Curse Maven Snippet

NeoForge

implementation "curse.maven:thunderhead-1655148:8664239"

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](https://github.com/DarkJest/thunderhead/blob/main/API.md)

### Notes

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

This mod has no additional files