WindLink 0.1.1 (2026-07-25)

A fix release. Two of these are the kind you would never have found by looking: the wind was stepping at 20 frames a second in shaders, and the MCWIND provider was never reaching any shader pack at all. Pairs with PlunderEngine 0.1.1 and PlunderPixels Shader v2.1.0 - update them together.

Wind

• Walls you build now shelter the wind properly. The search for what is blocking the flow stepped in 2.5-block strides, and a wall is one block thick - so it was found only about every fifth column, and never for the blocks closest to it. Shelter arrived in bands, and the spot directly behind a wall, where it should be strongest, had none at all. The near stretch is now checked block by block. Natural slopes shelter slightly more than before as a result, since small steps close to you are no longer stepped over.
• The wind now re-solves when you place or break blocks, so a wall you have just built starts sheltering immediately instead of waiting for you to walk away and come back.
• Fixed the wind reading incorrectly outside one 512-block region. A texture setting clamped at the edge rather than repeating, so at most world coordinates the terrain steering was reading edge data instead of the real field. If you were not near the world origin, terrain steering was effectively not working at all.

Smoothness

• Fixed shader wind stepping at 20 per second. The wind's phase was published once per game tick, so installing WindLink actually made a shader pack's wind less smooth than not installing it - the mod's own renderers looked fine only because they smoothed it themselves. It is now published every frame.

Third-party shader support

• Fixed the MCWIND provider never reaching any shader pack. The wind values were being handed to a point inside Iris that nothing calls any more, so every pack implementing the MCWIND standard quietly fell back to its own built-in wind and ignored WindLink entirely - wind presets included. They arrive now, and /windlink presets drive conforming third-party packs.
• Added BetterSmoke compatibility. Its smoke blows with the shared wind field and gusts, while keeping its own strength settings so every one of its options still works. BetterSmoke's own files are untouched - the compatibility lives entirely inside WindLink, and does nothing if BetterSmoke is not installed.

Grass and debris

• Fixed tall grass, ferns and dry grass slicing apart as they waved. They were using a subdivided model that the bundled shader can weld but other packs cannot. All seven vanilla plant models now use the vanilla shape. This trades the tip-curl arch for not tearing; the arch will come back as an opt-in resource pack.
• Grass debris now respects shelter. Blades used to tear off in the dead air behind a wall at the same rate as on the exposed side. Shedding now follows the wind that actually reaches each spot.

Interface

• The config screen has a working scrollbar.
• Strand carpet reaches much further for wide shots. The distant facade now goes to 1024 blocks (was 256) with grid spacing up to 24 (was 8), and the dense per-blade radius to 256 (was 64). Your render distance is still the real ceiling - the world has to be loaded that far out.