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Tilt The Planet! - Real Weather & Seasons

支持简体中文: 《把星球倾斜》— 真实天气与季节！


Most maps felt the same, and the planet's biomes fit together more like a patchwork than a living world.

Desert and forest maps look very different,

But each day they both changed exactly 7C - even though deserts are famous for hot days and cold nights and rainforests...aren't.

Yes, during winter snow covers the ground and crops don’t grow.

But the day length barely changes from winter to summer.

Shadows trace the same path - often pointing in the wrong direction because the sun is always in the north - even in a colony north of the equator!

The choice of which plants to farm mattered less than I expected. Rice - a tropical plant - grows just as well in cold biomes as corn or strawberries.

I wanted to find out why, so I did some digging and discovered two major reasons:



With an earth-like axial tilt, I finally experienced realistic day and night lengths - the biting chill of the frigid north wind that kept my colonists huddled indoors around the fire for warmth during the long, cold nights

Full celestial calculations let me witness the midnight sun during the polar day cast shadows that rotate 360 degrees in the far, far north or south. and also the long polar night where the sun doesn't rise for months at a time.

I also got to watch the moon phases slowly change from night to night, leaving some night brightly lit and others pitch-black - lit only by starlight.

Creating realistic weather to match real scientific observations made the stormclouds dark and threatening and made weather matter for farming - as they say in China 看天吃饭！(The heavens decide if we eat!)

And adding realistic lighting and shadows allowed me to watch the blinding red summer sun finally set in the south for the first time (in the northern hemisphere), and fade into the cool blues of twilight after a long, hard day of planting.

To see beautiful flickering aurora light up the sky, or watch the shadows slowly fade as a moon covers the sun during a solar eclipse.


Glaciers cannot survive summers of 20C+

Deserts don't usually border forests

And swamps should occupy lowlands, not be randomly placed.


Glacial plains exist only where they can survive, where summer is just barely warm enough to cause some melting.

Rainfall changes slowly with distance, seperating deserts from forests with shrubland.

Swamps exist is low-lying areas around bodies of water, not just scattered in the mountains.

And glowforests now sit in the perfect climate for growing mushrooms - not too hot and not too cold.


It required learning math to calculate where the sun and moon should be in the sky - so the seasons in game match what you see when you look outside your window at different times of the year.

Countless hours pouring over scientific literature to make sure the colors on your display change the same way real light does as it passes through clouds and raindrops on its way to your eyes.

And learning countless rules about rainfall and temperature requirements to place the biomes where you would expect them to be.

All this and more to make sure that when you subscribe to this mod, you feel like you’re right there with your colonistsavoiding obstacles as you find your way through the black shadows cast by the moon from a crystal clear starlit sky or caravanning through the desert on your way to the lush grasses on the other side.


I realize many people have tens if not hundreds of hours in your save files, so I made sure this mod can be safely added (or removed) from any saved game without any loss of progress or game crashes.

I designed it with mod compatibility and performance in mind - even if you have hundreds of other mods enabled.

And while realism is great for immersion - that doesn’t mean it’s always “fun” for everyone. That’s why...


You can choose how long moon phases last, whether plants grow like in vanilla, how dark shadows are, realistic biome generation or vanilla's patchwork quilt - or if you desire a really crazy experience - you can even Tilt the Planet far beyond earth's tilt and experience what life might be like on a planet quite different from our own!

• Tilt the Planet from 0 degrees (no seasons) to 90 degrees (hell planet) and everything in-between (default is earth tilt).
  
• Biome generation matching Earth's
  
• Realistic seasonal averages and daily temperature swings.
  
• Sunrise and sunset change both in time with the seasons and in position (allowing full Polar days and Polar Nights at high latitudes).
• Twilight and dusk can last minutes to hours depending on how far from the equator you settle.
  
• Pitch-black nights illuminated only by starlight to bright full moons with full moon phase support.
  
• Plants grow better in environments similar to their native-earth biome.
  
• Weather darkens the sky and even changes the color - like peering through the rain on a foggy day.
  
• Eclipses darken gradually as the moon slowly covers the sun.
  
• Tweakable settings for almost every feature.
  
• And much, much more!

Compatible with most non-lighting mods that don't change world generation. However, explicit support has been added for

• Alpha Biomes
  
• Long Night event from Vanilla Events Expanded
  
• Minor support for Realistic Planets

If you have another mod that alters world generation, there might be a conflict. Simply disable the worldgen setting for this mod and the conflict should resolve.

Moonless nights are by default dark for realism (to make outdoor lights more useful) - but there are 4 settings you can tweak to lighten the night sky to whatever brightness you prefer:

• Starlight & Airglow will brighten the night sky and are always "on" (they are basically the same, though slightly different colors and different brightnesses).
  
• Moon will boost the moon's light - but only when it is visible (if you prefer brighter moon-lit nights but still want dark moonless nights).
  
• Minimal Brightness will never let the sky dim below a set amount (configurable by you). This is more of a gameplay setting than a realism setting, as its meant to be temporarily toggled on (by simply pressing the 'L' key) by the player during night (for raids, night construction, or simply finding things easily) rather than on all the time as at high levels it can flatten colors and make nights less immersive.

This is a mod conflict with Performance Optimizer. Simply turn off the performance optimization for the Celestial Sun Glow setting to fix the issue. Another option would be to turn off the Solar Intensity Calculations setting for this mod (though that is not recommended as the light levels displayed will not match what you see).