Rain and thunder are here, and the world feels alive

More atmosphere! Last post the sun went down, and that immediately made me hungry for weather. So: rain is in. Proper rain, with puddles and everything. And because plain rain felt too friendly once it was on screen, I also wired up thunderstorms. Watch:

Rain, but as a weather system

Rain is not a particle effect that is always on. It is a proper weather state: the world can be dry, it can rain, and it can storm. The weather rolls in on its own schedule, so you dig for a while, look up, and suddenly the whole screen is streaked with rain.

The rain itself is drawn from a fixed, allocation-free particle pool, like everything else in the render stack. Drops fall fast and slightly slanted, the wind direction slowly drifts around, and the spawn rate scales with how much of the screen actually needs rain. It sits in the right spot in the layer stack, so it renders over the world but under the HUD, and it respects the reduced motion setting, because rain hammering down is exactly the kind of thing that turns into noise for some people.

The ground gets wet

The part that sells it, honestly: when it rains, the ground darkens and little puddles glimmer on the tiles. The world does not just have something falling in front of it, the world itself reacts. When the rain stops, everything dries out again. It is a small touch, but walking through your base right after a shower looks so much better than it has any right to.

Thunderstorms

And then there is the storm variant. Every few seconds a bolt lights up the sky for a frame, followed by a screen shake that makes your base feel like it is rattling. It is not gameplay-critical, but it does something to the mood: when a storm rolls in while you are deep in a tunnel, the world above suddenly feels bigger than you.

Storms are tuned through config, like all the atmosphere stuff. If the shake is too much for your taste, that is one number to change.

What is next

With daytimes, fog, and now weather, Buildom is slowly starting to feel like a place with a climate instead of a static background. The natural next question is what rain should actually do gameplay-wise, crops, water collection, that sort of thing, but no promises in the no-plan sort of way. For now I will just stand in my dirt hut and watch the storm roll over it.