Atmosphere & Lighting

Your world already runs a day/night cycle and weather. Atmosphere is where you decide how they look — how dark night gets, what color dusk is, how heavy the rain falls. Set it once and it applies everywhere: the game client and the map-editor's night preview both read these exact values, so what you preview is what players see.

Find it in World Config → Atmosphere, next to Weather & Time.

Nothing to set up to get started. Left untouched, the engine defaults give a deep-blue night, a cool dusk, and neutral daylight — a good look out of the box. Every field below is an override; anything you don't touch keeps its default.

Day / Night Ambient#

The world tints the whole scene by a single ambient color per phase, and blends smoothly between them as the clock moves. Think of it as a colored multiply over the world: **white = full daylight** (no change), and darker, tinted colors darken and color everything.

1. Open World Config → Atmosphere.
2. Under Day / Night Ambient, click the color swatch next to a phase.
3. Pick a color. The preview bar shows a sample of grassy ground as it will look under that

   ambient, so you can judge the darkening at a glance.

4. Save. Connected players see the change immediately.

Night intensity (master darkness) scales all the darkening at once without touching each phase: 0× never darkens (permanent day feel), 1× is exactly what you set above, 2× is twice as dark. Use it to dial the whole cycle moodier or brighter in one move.

On High and Ultra lighting the corners of the screen also darken a little at night. That follows your night too: a lighter Night color or a lower Night intensity lightens the corners by the same share, and at 0× they stay at their day-time level all night. A night darker than the default keeps the default corners.

Interior darkness sets how much of the night reaches maps marked Interior (Map Properties → Gameplay Rules). Interiors always keep the world's time — step into a tavern at midnight and it's still night inside — this slider only decides how dark that looks:

• Reset on any phase drops just that phase back to its default.
• Reset all to defaults clears every atmosphere override in one click.

Weather Looks#

Every weather type has a full editor: pick a weather pill under Weather Looks and tune everything about how it renders. All nine weathers are editable — Cloudy gets drifting cloud shadows, Heatwave gets heat shimmer, and the precipitation types get falling particles that actually land on the ground.

1. Under Weather Looks, click the weather you want to change (a dot marks weathers you've

   customized).

2. Tune the groups below. Anything you don't touch keeps the engine default.
3. Save. Connected players see the new look immediately.

Particles#

Wind#

One global wind drives everything — particles, fog banks, cloud shadows.

Ground#

Rain splashes where it lands and leaves the ground wet (darker, with a faint sheen); snow accumulates into a cover that builds while it snows and melts after. Water never takes cover. To keep other terrain clear too (roads, lava, glass floors), add its tileset under World → Atmosphere → Ground Cover Exclusions — excluded terrain stays bare in every weather, and removing it from the list lets it accumulate again. Water is recognised by its tileset name: a tileset whose name contains "water" stays bare on its own. An imported RPG Maker water sheet named something else (such as an A1 sheet) needs adding to Ground Cover Exclusions.

Every player sees the same cover. The game server keeps track of how much snow has settled and how wet the ground is, so a player who joins, reconnects or changes map in the middle of a storm sees the snow that has already built up, the same as someone who has been online all along. This needs the updated game server; before that, each player's snow still starts building from the moment they arrive.

Snow is drawn like a hand-painted winter tile: a few flat tones — sunlit white, a soft mid tone, a cool blue shade and a deep blue for contact shadows — rather than a white haze over the map. A light fall settles as broad patches on the rises of the ground while the rest stays bare; as the build-up continues the patches merge into **one clean blanket**, and a thaw shrinks it back the same way. It banks up against the foot of walls and cliffs, overhangs the edge of roofs and wall tops, and lies trodden a shade darker on paths. On high and ultra weather quality it also drifts against the base of objects and catches the light in the odd glint.

Snow settles on your objects too, not just the ground. Trees, roofs, fences and crates each get their own cap, worked out from the art you gave them rather than painted on: the game finds the parts of each object with open sky above them, picks out the lit top edges inside a dense shape (so a thick wood looks snowed-on all the way in, not just along its outline), piles thick soft caps on them — deepest on roofs and tower tops, a neat cap on a post that keeps its dark sides — and cools the rest. The pattern is anchored to the world, so drifts run continuously across the join between one area and the next instead of restarting. It fades in and out with the ground cover, so objects and ground always agree about how deep the snow is. Nothing to author — any object with normal art takes snow automatically. Shows on low weather quality and above (low draws a lighter version).

Anything that walks — players, NPCs, mobs, pets, mounts — leaves footprints pressed into the snow: shaded hollows, separate left/right prints that point the way they walked, so paths emerge where people actually travel. While the weather continues, fresh fall slowly fills old tracks back in; once it clears, prints stay until the cover melts. Footprints appear on low weather quality and above.

Fire melts snow. Any light that flickers and burns warm — a torch, a campfire, a brazier — thaws a clear patch of cover around itself, roughly half the radius it lights, over about six seconds. Steady or cold-colored lights (a blue mage lamp, a magic crystal) light the snow without thawing it, so you control which of your props melt by the light you give them: give it a flicker and a warm color and it burns. A thawed patch stays thawed after the fire goes out, and fills back in with the next snowfall. Melting needs medium weather quality or above.

Build-up and melt are shown in seconds, and those seconds are **measured against your world clock**, not the wall clock: they are read as seconds on a 60-minute day and stretch with your day length. Set a four-hour day and a 75-second build-up takes five real minutes — the same slice of the in-game day it always was, so snow still settles over roughly half a morning instead of arriving before the sun has moved. You don't need to re-tune anything when you change day length.

Fog & Haze#

Fog is layered scrolling banks at different depths, not a flat wash. Blizzard and sandstorm reuse the same machinery as a driven haze.

Storm#

Sky & Wash#

Gotchas#

• Every lighting tier shows your day and night — including Off. A player's **Settings →

  Graphics → Lighting choice changes lights and shadows, never the time of day. Off** removes point lights and shadows; night still falls exactly as you authored it.

• **Day/night ambient needs the Day/Night Cycle feature

  flag on** to actually change over time. With it off, the world sits at whatever fixed time you set in Weather & Time — your ambient still applies to that time, it just won't move.

• Weather looks need the Weather feature flag on. With it off there's no weather to

  color.

• Custom textures fall back gracefully. While a texture loads (or if it fails), the

  engine's procedural art renders — the weather never blanks out.

• Players choose a weather quality tier in Settings → Weather (Auto follows their

  lighting tier). Low-end devices see fewer particles and skip cloud shadows / shimmer, but the wash and lightning always show — a storm still reads as a storm. Ground effects step down in this order: snow on objects and snow glints need high, fire melt and cloud shadows need medium, footprints and the cover itself go all the way down to low. Snow on objects survives reduced motion, unlike the glints — it sits still, so there is nothing for it to make worse.

• Changes apply on Save. Connected players update live; a player who is mid-load picks the

  new values up on spawn. In the map editor, the night/dusk preview uses these values too.

• White noon is intentional. If noon looks tinted, you likely set a non-white color there —

  reset it for true daylight.

• Weather and time look "different" on one map? Check that map's Interior flag first.

  An outdoor town marked interior shows no weather and only part of the night; a house left unmarked gets rain falling through its roof. Weather and the clock are one world-wide state — only the interior flag changes how a map shows them.

• Interiors hide weather (maps marked interior show none), and ten seconds indoors won't

  melt the snow outside — cover picks back up where it was when the player steps out.

• Shadows have their own section further down the same tab. See

  Shadows.