Minecraft Weather Update ideas.
Note: ZERO natural disasters.
All of these are just my ideas that I personally would find awesome.
The weather system has remained incredibly similar since apparently alpha, even I didnt think it was that long, most changes seem extremely minor, and I believe it is time for an overhaul, especially when the new rendering engine is out.
Overworld:
Instead of 3 weathers, its a gradient from perfectly clear to raging thunderstorm, and the game transitions between them at varying speeds without skipping around, but it could go from clear to thunder very quickly. For example, maybe theres 16 levels of precipitation, lightning only spawns at, say, 12+. The old weathers could maybe be
Clear - 0
Rain - 6 or 8 ig
Thunder - 12 or 13 or smth.
This gives us a lot of play to fill in the gaps with new levels.
Maybe at low levels (1-3) mobs don't even burn, and the light level doesnt go down much.
Rename from "rain" and "thunderstorm", because in snow biomes they arent rain, also because its now a gradient.
Lightning turns sand to glass if struck, lightning doesnt spawn in deserts because no downfall, but during the strongest thunderstorms (such as 16), which are very rare, the deserts will have some rain.
Snow layer parity, including snowlogging and falling. Snowwy leaf parity, java finally gets white leaves. Snow accumulation increases rate at higher levels of precipitation, lightning only spawning at level 16.
Players would be able to sleep to skip any weather levels that allow lightning to spawn.
The game would be able to see the next few levels ahead of time, and might be able to use that in fun ways. Such as farm animals behaving anxiously before a sharp increase in weather (such as going from 2 to 13 in the next minute or two).
Nether:
Give the Nether weather. Because we are starting from scratch and have no previous to build off of, it can easily be as simple as the old Overworld weather system.
The lack of sky is the only major hurdle, but I would wager it can be easily worked around by using volumetric weather, if a block is in the open, and has lines of sight of 5 blocks long, it is effected.
What might Nether Weather be like? Its fantasy, this is ultimate freedom.
Spitballing some ideas:
Ash storm - A very obvious idea, maybe gives poison to any overworld mob caught in it that isnt in a sealed area (an area with zero paths to affected air blocks).
Cold spur - A very un obvious idea that could create very interesting gameplay, the Nether is hellishly hot, so what if its weather could introduce sudden cold spurs that drop the temperature to below boiling, if course to an overworld perspective it is still very very hot, but to a Nether perspective, 60c/140f is frigid.
Firestorm - meh probably too much like a natural disaster.
End Weather:
End flashes are already de facto treated as weather-like by the wiki, lets run with that, with the end being so space like, we could have periods with few flashes, periods with current flash rate, and periods with very frequent, very bright flashes, we could tie it in with the dragon, where the current rate or the zero flashes rate is the only one used while the dragon is alive. Also, end flashes would be parity-fied so that with and without vibrant visuals, they are enabled, by porting Java's to the no vibrant visual Bedrock. It could have effects too, such as Enderman behaving differently during extreme flash periods (theyve never seen that before because the Dragon magically prevented the extreme flash rate as mentioned), to make it truly behave like weather.
