WeatherOverhaul

WeatherOverhaul

Valheim's weather is a painted backdrop: flat cloud layers, a sky that is mostly a colour gradient, and a thick fog that hides everything a few hundred metres out. WeatherOverhaul replaces it with a real sky. Clouds have volume and drift with the wind, rain comes in under a dark front, the air is clear enough to see the next island, and sunlight falls through the trees in shafts. Everything still follows the game's own weather, biomes and time of day, so a storm is still a storm and the Mistlands still look like the Mistlands.

What you get

• Sky. A physical atmosphere: blue days, red and golden sunsets, a long twilight after the sun goes down and a

moonlit night. The game's stars, northern lights and sun stay. The moon goes through its phases over 30 game days.

• Clouds. Volumetric clouds instead of the flat layers: fair-weather cumulus, broken clouds with the sun in the

gaps, dark rain and storm decks, snow and fog banks, and cirrus high up that catches the sunset. Their shadows sweep over the land on fair days, and water reflects them.

• Weather fronts. A change of weather shows up upwind first and passes overhead when the game switches. Distant

rain falls from the clouds in grey shafts.

• Lightning. Bolts, flashes inside the clouds and thunder that arrives late from far strikes. Thunderstorms can

also come to the Plains and the Swamp, where the game has none.

• Clearer air. You see 5 to 8 times further than in the vanilla fog: about 6 km on a clear day, about 1 km in rain.

Fog thins out with height, so hilltops rise out of it. Some mornings have mist in the lowlands, and a light mist lies over the open sea. The Mistlands keep the game's own short view.

• Light shafts. Sun and moonlight fall through gaps in trees, mountains and clouds, strongest in mist and haze.
• Snow. Softer falling snow that roofs and rock keep off, snow drifting along the ground in strong wind, and a

snow layer on the mountains that covers the rocks too.

• Puddles. Rain fills small dips in the ground. You can see the bottom through the water, raindrops ring the

surface, and the puddles dry up after the rain.

• Fireflies. On dry nights in the Meadows, the Black Forest and the Plains.
• Biomes keep their mood. Ash and a red glow over the Ashlands, low lilac clouds over the Mistlands, cold clean air

in the Deep North, humid haze over the Swamp.

Requirements

• BepInEx for Valheim (required)
• Configuration Manager (optional; every setting can be changed while you play)
• FarLands (optional; with it the air also lies over FarLands' distant land)

Installation

1. Close Valheim.
2. Extract the archive into the Valheim game folder, so that the DLL ends up at

Valheim/BepInEx/plugins/WeatherOverhaul.dll. With a mod manager, install it as usual.

Multiplayer

Client-side only. The server and other players need nothing, and nothing is written to your world. Players who have the mod see the same sky, clouds and air, because all of it comes from the world's own weather and time. Players in one thunderstorm see the same lightning strike at the same moment and hear the same thunder. The rare bolts close to a player are shared only with players who have that player loaded (about 100 m) or who see them on the map. The clouds' drift and fireflies are worked out on each machine, so they differ between players.

Performance

At Ultra with every part on, the mod costs about 2.4-3 ms of GPU time per frame at 2560x1440 on an RTX 4070 SUPER, mostly for the clouds. On a weaker card pick a lower Profile, or turn off the parts you can live without.

Settings

Everything is in BepInEx/config/ru.ivest.weatheroverhaul.cfg and changes apply while you play. Each part of the mod has its own section with an Enabled switch. Turning a part off gives you the game's own version of it back.

General

| Setting | Default | What it does | |---|---|---| | Profile | Auto | Quality: Auto picks one for your PC; Low, Medium, High and Ultra force one; Custom is Auto plus your own changes. |

Settings set to -1 follow the profile. Any other value overrides the profile for that setting only.

Sky

| Setting | Default | What it does | |---|---|---| | Enabled | true | The physical sky. | | SkyBrightness | 0.8 | Daytime sky brightness compared to the game's. | | NightBrightness | 1 | Night sky brightness compared to the game's. | | MoonPhases | true | Moon phases over 30 game days, the same for every player. Off: a full moon every night. | | MoonPhaseKeys | true | The moon's phase as a world key for other mods' scripts (e.g. only at the full moon): moon_new, moon_waxing_crescent, moon_first_quarter, moon_waxing_gibbous, moon_full, moon_waning_gibbous, moon_last_quarter, moon_waning_crescent. Changes at noon, so a night has one phase. Set by any player with the mod; the server needs nothing. | | MoonPhaseKeyPrefix | moon_ | The moon keys' prefix. | | MainMenu | true | The sky and clouds over the main menu too. | | MainMenuSun | 2.5 | The sun's height over the main menu, in degrees (11 = the game's own menu evening, below 0 = dusk). | | VanillaSkyColour | 1 | How much of the game's own sky colour to keep (0 = pure physical colours). | | HorizonFog | true | Fades distant land into the sky's colour. Only used while Air is off. | | Clouds | true | Volumetric clouds. | | CloudBrightness | 0.7 | Cloud brightness. Lower gives grey bases and more shape. | | ExtraCloudLayers | true | Altocumulus and distant towering cumulus on some fair days. | | CloudParallax | 0.5 | How much the clouds shift as you move. 1 = like real clouds, 0 = fixed like the game's. | | CloudShadows | true | Cloud shadows on the land. |