WindLink

One wind for the whole world.

Stand in a field when a gust comes through. Leaves tear off the canopy upwind, stream past you, and the grass kicks as they pass. The blades bend into an arc, a wave of light rolls across the field, the mist on the river billows and thins, and the same gust that did all of that keeps going over the hill and dies in the lee behind it. That is WindLink: not a set of separate effects that each fake their own breeze, but a single wind that everything reads.

WindLink requires PlunderEngine, the core the whole Link suite plugs into, and it pairs with the PlunderPixels Shader for the full picture. It also works with no shader at all.

plunderengine.com is the project home: screenshots, clips, the full documentation, and the wind standard behind all of it.

Shader developers: WindLink publishes its wind through MCWIND, a public domain standard any pack can implement. Vendor one header and your foliage reads the same wind this mod drives, and it still works for players with no mod installed. There is a worked integration in a real third party pack here: Eclipse with MCWIND support. Grass and canopy, both passes, three files, every decision documented. The integration guidance lives there and on the site rather than on this page.

The wind itself

Underneath everything is one wind field that every effect reads. It is not random flutter on a timer: the gust fronts, the heading, the terrain flow all come out of one shared wind engine running on a steady clock of its own, so it keeps blowing smoothly no matter what a time or seasons mod does to your world clock. WindLink hands that same clock to the PlunderPixels Shader, so the mod's particles and the shader's waving terrain run the exact same math and move on one wind.

The terrain shapes the flow, computed live from the ground around you:

Calm wakes form in the lee of hills, and of walls you build.
Exposed crests speed the wind up.
Valleys funnel and accelerate it.
Forest floors stay becalmed under the canopy.
Flow deflects around walls and obstacles instead of blowing through them.

Weather feeds in too. Storms build real gust fronts that travel across the ground, snow biomes behave like snow, and lightning strikes publish a live channel so the shader can flash the sky and shadows with the actual strike.

You control it with /windlink: presets calm, breezy, gusty, storm, and auto, plus a live readout of the wind at your feet. The same controls sit in the PlunderEngine settings screen. There is also an off-by-default 3D streamline visualizer that draws the actual computed wind, which I built for tuning and kept in because watching the flow bend around a hill is half the point.

Trees

Minecraft tells a shader how far each leaf block sits from the nearest log, and that sounds like exactly what you want for holding a canopy onto its tree. The trouble is that it is a whole number per block, so two leaf blocks pressed against each other can carry different numbers, move by different amounts, and slide apart. A canopy would split open down the middle and bare the wood it was supposed to be hanging from.

WindLink now works out distance to wood as a smooth field spread across the world instead. Two leaves at the same point always read the same value, so no gap can open between them, and because the value changes slightly from one side of a block to the other, a leaf block bends where it used to slide. Leaves touching wood are held as still as the wood itself, and further out they get freer, so a branch curves away from the trunk with its tips trailing furthest.

A still tree is no longer a frozen tree either. In dead calm the canopy keeps a slow drift, the crown holds a deep lean in strong wind and breathes rather than sitting rigid, and when a gust lets go the crown springs back through its resting position and settles.

If you use a bushy leaf resource pack like Better Leaves, the fronds that stick out past the block edge bend along their length and hang a little at rest, lifting as the wind takes them. Plain vanilla leaves are completely unaffected.

What rides the wind

Leaves shed off canopies and stream downwind. They tumble, deflect around walls, and settle.
Gusts tear small grass blades loose where they land, and not in the sheltered air behind a wall.
Desert wind picks up dust.
The game's own falling leaf particles ride the same field instead of drifting straight down.
Debris drafts the grass it streams past. I call this the gust-wake: a leaf skimming a field leaves a visible kick in the blades behind it, the small coupling a broad gust cannot carry on its own.
The deep blue vanilla rain splash becomes a clear, translucent one.

Water

WindLink reads the water around you and builds an actual understanding of it: which blocks belong to which body, where the shores are, and how the surface should react. Splashes and rain ripple the water, and with the shader pack those shore and ripple channels feed the water rendering directly, so the surface responds to what is actually happening on it.

Ground cover and seasons

Wind-driven ground cover, including a strand grass carpet that renders grass as individual blades riding the field. Fair warning: the carpet is the heaviest thing in the mod, so it ships turned off. Flip it on from the Grass panel if your machine has the headroom. The shader's own waved grass carries the wind fine without it.
A season cycle that recolors foliage. The mod is the season authority, so its own leaf and grass debris and the shader's foliage recolor stay on one calendar instead of drifting apart.
A heat field that tracks torches, campfires, fire, and lava, published for heat shimmer.
Dynamic block-light shadow channels, so light sources can cast moving shadows shader-side.

With the PlunderPixels Shader

The PlunderPixels Shader was built to be fed by this mod, which means the shader knows things a shader alone cannot know: where water bodies and their shores are, the exact wind and its gusts, how the terrain bends the flow, where heat and light sources sit, what season it is, and what the ground cover is doing.

The grass is where it shows most. Blades bend as real blades: honami waves roll across a field as travelling bands of light, each clump flutters on its own phase, and the blade heights are measured off your active texture pack by the mod (through PlunderEngine's texture parsing), so the visible part of the blade bends correctly on any resource pack. Terrain waving, clouds, and morning mist all drift on the same wind as the debris streaming past you.

Without the mods, every one of those integrations degrades cleanly to the pack's own fallbacks. Without the pack, WindLink's in-game effects all still run. Each side stands alone; together they are one system.

Compatibility

Requires PlunderEngine 0.1.2 or newer. It is a required dependency, so launchers install it for you, and the version floor is enforced rather than advisory.
Fabric, Minecraft 26.1.x, Java 25 or newer.
Client-side only and vanilla-server safe: WindLink sends nothing to a server, adds nothing to the world, and can be added or removed at any time.
Sodium and Iris are optional and recommended. The PlunderPixels Shader unlocks the full integration, and so does any pack that implements MCWIND.

Mods and packs that get something extra when WindLink is installed:

Motschen's Better Leaves and its forks. These build leaf blocks out of fronds that stick out past the block edge, and WindLink bends those free ends along their length and hangs them slightly at rest, lifting as the wind takes them. You do not turn anything on for this and plain vanilla leaves are untouched by it, so a pack that does not do this costs nothing.
BetterSmoke. Its smoke rides the shared wind field and its gusts instead of looping on its own timer, while keeping its own strength settings, so every one of its options still does what it did. BetterSmoke's own files are not modified: the compatibility lives inside WindLink and does nothing at all when BetterSmoke is absent.
Eclipse with MCWIND support, a fork of the Eclipse shader that reads this mod's wind through the MCWIND standard. Grass and canopy, in both the geometry and shadow passes.

Where this is going

The project is under serious active development. I am building it to be accessible: presets for people who just want wind, sliders and a full settings screen for people who want to tune every part of it, and clean fallbacks so nothing breaks when a piece is missing.

Community feedback directly shapes what gets built next. If something looks wrong, runs slow on your machine, or you have an idea for what the wind should touch next, say so. I read it, and it decides what I build.

WindLink - PlunderEngine

PlunderEngine