I agree this snow event is way overdone. I suspect many new players entered the game and quickly left due to how the snow cover essentially disables beginner planets.
I love additional content and depth added to the game but the snow does make building incredibly unpleasant for me. If weather effects do not get a setting PLEASE make it so the weather effects coincide with the biome players choose to build in.
Personally I have built on top of an ash field on a tier 2 planet and I feel that snow would not make sense to fall in that particular area.
Would you be able to share more details about which weather effects will occur in specific biomes?
I liked the snow. I agree it did make it hard to build but the weather effects do make the planets feel more alive. I think a solution for people who like it and for people who didnt is to add another seasonal craftable item you can make with the candy canes (for next year of course). It would work like a regen bomb but it would only get rid of the snow in the blast area. Keeping the snow for those who want it and a way for people who dislike it to get rid of it.
Similar to what @a13o suggested
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The weather bombs James mentioned earlier in this thread sound like a great addition!
Btw I missed the part where James said rain got promoted to snow and after the event there should be less snow but, should there ever be snow in a desert on a tier 2 planet??
Yea the weather bombs do sound cool but i wonder about potential griefing. For example someone using a snow bomb while you’re trying to build. But i guess they could implent it so the weather effects only work within your own beaconed area
Snow bomb me any time!!
I would like a “snow globe dome” on my place, bc it is sooo pretty coming down.
Running around on a t1, I agree it can get intense, but I think that was mostly bc of meteors.
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I +1 the idea for weather bombs to only work in your own beaconed area a million times.
Weather is biome specific.
(Rough idea is.)
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All biomes are setup with Temperature, Humidity, Altitude and Vegetation parameters which are used during biome selection and blending in the world builder. The world configs can then define how the biomes should vary across the world.
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We then save these static biome maps so that it can be used by the weather simulation. Below are the Altitude, Temperature, Humidity and Vegetation maps from one of the live worlds. This doesn’t change as the biomes are fixed. The world below is fairly noisy but world can have clear bands of the biomes as you might expect from a planet with polar and equator biome variations.
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A weather simulation is then run on the server so that everyone gets the same weather. If you look in the distance or through a portal within a world then the weather remains consistent. Dark clouds in the distance means rain in the distance, etc.
The simulation uses the biome maps so that the weather is consistent for the biome. If you think it rains often in your settlement then you unknowingly placed your beacon is a wet biome.
The simulation drives temperature, humidity, elemental and wind direction.
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The simulation ticks so that the weather moves around the world and is biome suitable. Quick sample:
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This is then simplified for rendering:
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The clouds are also driven by the simulation. These images are for cloud coverage, type of clouds, precipitation of the clouds, normal vs elemental clouds, occlusion (?) and snow cover.
The elemental clouds should be coloured and standout against the normal clouds, but this is currently being blown out by the strong coloured day/night colours. Elemental clouds are an indicator for elemental weather. (Which will drive gameplay in the future in the same way that the snowy areas spawned more oortmas creatures.)
The snow cover map determines which parts of the world should be snow covered.
When a snow meteorite lands a spot is placed into the snow cover map to turn make the environment snow covered.
And yes we have joked about the idea of using these cloud maps for rendering clouds and snow cover onto the planets seen in the sky. But decided against it as it would require quite a bit of bandwidth and mask the player builds.
I think the main reason the majority of players miss the weather + biome association is because they don’t recognise a “desert” when the sand isn’t yellow. The non-earthlike palettes aren’t recognisable as biomes. Hence Boundless is often criticised for having little variation between worlds. I’ve often put this down to limited exploration as there is clearly huge variation in biomes (IMO), but it’s definitely not helped by the foreign colour combinations.
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That was an awesome explanation. Although I feel the opposite about the biome colors. I want more variation in color. I don’t care if people don’t recognize a desert without yellow sand. I want sand of all colors. And all blocks of all colors for that matter.
I get a little disappointed when I look at that google docs color sheet that someone made which shows all of the planets and their blocks colors. It seems like so many of the planets share similar colors for the same things.
I want crazy variation. I want black wood. I want bright red stone. I want black and red foliage.
We have a couple of things in the pipeline that will deliver more block colours into the universe … without relying only on the world generation to select unique colours.
Before 1.0 when we were making the new universe I ran a simulation to see how many unique block colours would be generated if we created 1000s worlds. Some block types used 200+ but others remained <100. This was a result of the colour selection recipes we were creating.
(I genuinely think that world colouring is one of the hardest problems we attempted with Boundless. I’m aware that it gets abused - “too much pink!” - but I think it does a pretty decent job. I’d love to spend more time on it… but…)
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Was playing around with the weather in a shop a few weeks back… this plot is raining, and if I stand in that plot the rain stops… back to this plot for more rain, and again stand in that plot and it stops.
Had no idea Boundless had “real” weather patterns like the graphic shows! Always thought it was just a Goblin pulling a lever at random.
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I am with u…snow is just annoying i hope there is no future for it…in Australia it aint snowing …its so annoying to see on the ps4 we dont have extra graphics control to make it a little better and why should i waste regen bombs on removing it. It sucks for building
Dyes for creating our own blocks confirmed!
Thank you for the incredibly in depth answer!
This should probably belong in the useful references thread 
Yey! It RAINED!
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It’s great @james , I admire it. I am more attentive to weather changes on my planet after reading your demonstration. It’s crazy work! 
Hahaha, naughty !!! 
