Torrents

Vanilla water has no direction. Rivers appear where the noise dips, end nowhere, and never meet. Torrent replaces that with a real drainage network. Follow any brook downstream and you reach the ocean. Walk upstream and you find the spring it came from. Everything is computed from your world seed, so the same seed always gives the same great river in the same valley.

What changes in your world

Water comes in sizes, and they add up. Torrent measures how much land drains through each point:

• Brooks — 2-4 blocks wide, gravel bottom, you step over them.
• Rivers — 6-16 blocks, sand and clay beds, wide enough to boat.
• Great rivers — up to 30 blocks, deep, opening into an estuary at the coast.

Every confluence makes the water wider, so the size of a river tells you how much land lies upstream.

Springs, ponds and resurgences. Each course starts at a spring pool with lily pads. A basin with no outlet becomes a pond instead of stopping in a field. And where a river would have to cut a mountain in half, it goes underground and reappears lower down.

Waterfalls with plunge pools. Courses run almost flat, then drop — clean falls up to 8 blocks. At the foot, the water has scoured a deep basin down to bare stone, ringed with moss, under a white curtain of falling water, spray and hanging mist.

Banks that look like banks. The channel is cut after the terrain and caves, and the biome's own surface is lifted off and put back on the new bank — sand banks in a desert, snow in a taiga. Reeds grow exactly at the waterline. Meanders are asymmetric: the outer bank is steep and undercut, the inner one silts into a beach. Gravel bars braid through the wider rivers.

The current pushes you. Jump in and you drift downstream, harder on big rivers. Boats and dropped items go with it, and foam streaks on the surface show you which way the sea is.

A living surface. Shore foam that follows the waterline and washes in and out, wave crests crossing open water, mist rising at dawn and over rapids, bubble rafts at the foot of falls.

Performance

Effects yield automatically: when frame time rises, the foam radius tightens and particles stop; when it recovers, they come back. One config line — fxQuality set to eleve, normal, leger, minimal or aucun — sets everything, and each layer can be switched off on its own without losing the rivers. /torrent pregen <radius> generates an area up front, useful before opening a server or recording.

Commands

• /torrent here — what you are standing in: type, drainage area, width, water level, flow direction
• /torrent pregen <radius> — pre-generate an area, with progress
• /torrent stats — diagnostics (op)

Requirements

Minecraft 1.21.1 · Fabric · Fabric API. Overworld only. Works with modified world generation — Torrent reads the terrain your generator actually produces. Node spacing is written into the world on first generation, so changing the config later will not cut existing rivers in half. An optional water texture pack ships with the mod, off by default.

What this mod is not

No blocks, no items, no mobs, no dimensions, no biome changes. It changes one thing: where water goes, and what that looks like. If you have ever followed a Minecraft river hoping it led somewhere, this is the mod that makes it lead somewhere.