Where Winds Blow

Added

• Direct support for Acedium Sodiumized 0.4.1 when its NVIDIA terrain renderer is active.
• A Terrain Renderer Backend compatibility setting with Automatic, Sodium, and Acedium / Nvidium choices. Changing the renderer integration settings now rebuilds responsive foliage immediately.
• Convention-based biome world-generation profiles using NeoForge c: tags, allowing suitably tagged modded plains, forests, jungles, savannas, taigas, swamps, rivers, deserts, and badlands to inherit built-in grass placement.
• A dedicated has_tall_grass_fields profile for plains and meadows, with tall-grass passes at 25% of normal frequency.
• Field-specific overgrown grass in plains and meadows at 12.5% of normal frequency.
• Light short-grass scatter placement using the no-leaves heightmap, improving coverage beneath trees and across uneven terrain.
• A bounded grass_cover world-generation feature for dense, medium, and sparse short grass. It evaluates each chunk column once, adds coherent noise variation, honors configured density passes, and caps total coverage at 88%.
• Bonemeal progression for grass variants: flat grass grows into vanilla short grass, while a complete two-block tall-grass plant grows into a three-block overgrown-grass column when space permits.
• Responsive-foliage composition with Continuity model wrappers, preserving connected and emissive rendering while applying wind and interaction behavior to the underlying foliage model.
• Snow! Real Magic compatibility for snow-covered plants and leaves, including contained-block profile detection, column sway, local interaction, preserved vertex marker alpha, and snow top surfaces that move with supporting leaves.
• Block-update and chunk-unload invalidation hooks shared by lantern and snowfall caches, keeping cached render data synchronized with world changes.

Changed

• Dynamic wind simulation time now stops while the game window is inactive and resumes without a time jump when focus returns.
• The terrain-renderer compatibility toggle was generalized from "Sodium Wind Patch" to "Terrain Renderer Integration" so it controls all supported terrain backends.
• Grass biome assignments now favor ecosystem profiles: jungles and cherry groves receive dense short grass; plains, forests, savannas, and meadows receive medium short grass; taigas and windswept biomes receive sparse short grass; forests, jungles, savannas, and cherry groves receive regular tall grass; forests, taigas, and jungles receive fern accents; swamps, rivers, and flower forests receive regular overgrown grass; deserts and badlands receive dry grass; and savannas receive dead grass.
• Tall-grass, fern, overgrown-grass, and wild-wheat placement was expanded from mostly vanilla biome lists to convention tags, improving compatibility with modded biomes while retaining special vanilla biome entries where needed.
• Tall-grass and fern placement now uses terrain noise to form broad coherent regions rather than evenly distributed spots.
• Tall-grass patches now use smaller, less dense irregular interiors with a short-grass fringe.
• Overgrown-grass patches now use smaller, sparser height-graded cores that transition through tall grass into mixed short grass.
• Dense, medium, and sparse built-in short-grass generation now uses one bounded cover feature per profile instead of repeated scatter and cluster features. Per-pass base coverage is 10%, 6.5%, and 3.5%, respectively, with a 5:2 mix of vanilla short grass to flat grass.
• Swinging-lantern discovery is now cached until an actual block update or chunk unload, reducing chunk scans from six to two per frame; collision checks run every two ticks instead of every frame.
• GPU snowfall now caches surface-height and biome precipitation samples with bounded caches, refreshes visible data only after movement or relevant world changes, and clears caches when changing levels.
• CPU snowfall fallback density was reduced: fancy range 12->10, fancy flakes per column 12->8, fast range 7->6, fast flakes per column 6->4, and fancy vertical span 22->20.

Removed

• Periodic rescanning of cached swinging-lantern chunks.
• Full GPU snowfall terrain and precipitation resampling every five ticks.
• The built-in dense, medium, and sparse biome modifiers' legacy eight-pass scatter/cluster feature chains; their datapack definitions remain available, but the default profiles now route through bounded cover passes.