Desert Storms

Overview

Desert Storms is an immersive weather and survival mod for Minecraft's desert and badlands biomes. It adds large, multi-phase sandstorms that can be seen approaching from a distance and gradually turn the surrounding landscape into a dangerous, low-visibility environment.

Storms affect much more than the player's screen. Wind pushes players, mobs, dropped items and projectiles, animals try to find shelter, hostile mobs struggle to see through heavy dust, debris flies through the air, sand accumulates across exposed terrain, and powerful storms can bring lightning and other environmental hazards.

Features

Five-Phase Storm System
Sandstorms progress through five different intensity levels. Early phases reduce visibility and introduce stronger winds, while later phases become significantly more dangerous with severe fog, stronger wind forces, environmental effects and lightning.

Storms can naturally intensify or weaken over time, and their duration, phase behaviour and many other values can be configured.

Large World-Space Sandstorms
Sandstorms are not limited to a screen overlay. Large clouds of airborne sand fill the affected desert and can be seen from outside the biome before you enter the storm.

Higher phases greatly reduce visibility, while the strongest storms can make travelling through open desert extremely difficult.

Pre-Storm Warning
Naturally triggered sandstorms do not appear instantly. Before a storm begins, distant sand clouds, wind, atmospheric effects and sounds gradually build up, giving players time to find shelter.

The warning duration can be configured.

Wind Physics
Storm wind physically affects the world.

• Players are pushed by the wind
• Crouching reduces the effect on player movement
• Mobs are pushed depending on their size
• Smaller mobs can be partially lifted during powerful storms
• Dropped items are carried by the wind
• Arrows and other projectiles are affected by crosswind
• Wind strength changes depending on the current storm phase

Sheltered entities are affected much less than entities exposed to the open storm.

Mob Behaviour
Animals, villagers and some other passive mobs attempt to seek covered areas during stronger storms.

Sandstorms also reduce mob visibility. Hostile mobs can lose distant targets when the storm becomes too dense, while nearby targets remain dangerous.

Shelter System
The mod detects roofs, walls and exposure to the direction of the wind.

Proper shelter protects players from many storm effects, including wind, particles and reduced visibility. Deep caves are also detected correctly, preventing storm fog and airborne sand from appearing underground.

Flying Debris
Strong storms carry low-poly environmental debris through the air, including:

• Sticks
• Dry branches
• Leaf clumps
• Gravel
• Sandstone fragments
• Tumbleweeds

Debris uses a dedicated client-side renderer instead of Minecraft's particle engine, allowing large amounts of moving debris without adding server-side entities.

Sand Accumulation
Powerful Phase 4 and Phase 5 storms can leave thin sand drifts across exposed natural terrain.

Sand accumulation only occurs outdoors and is limited per chunk to avoid covering entire areas or heavily modifying player builds.

The system can be disabled or configured on the server.

Lightning and Screen Effects
Strong storm phases can produce lightning strikes with distance-based screen shake and bright flashes.

Lightning frequency is controlled to prevent excessive flashing during the strongest phases.

Navigation Interference
During a sandstorm, the F3 debug screen remains available, but coordinate information becomes unreliable.

Displayed XYZ, block and chunk coordinates can continuously change, swap axes, invert directions or show completely incorrect positions.

The system is designed to work without requiring individual integrations for every minimap or navigation mod.

Dynamic Audio
Storm ambience changes depending on storm intensity and the player's surroundings.

Sounds transition immediately when phases change and no longer have long silent gaps between tracks.

Storm audio is heavily muffled underground or inside enclosed shelters, while exposed areas feature stronger wind, gusts and occasional environmental impact sounds.

In-Game Configuration
Desert Storms includes a dedicated configuration screen accessible directly from the pause menu.

Graphics presets are available for:

• LOW
• MEDIUM
• HIGH
• ULTRA
• CUSTOM

Available client settings include:

• Storm cloud rendering
• Cloud density
• Render distance
• Fog
• World darkness
• Vignette
• Particle density
• Wind debris
• Debris density
• Lightning flash
• Camera shake
• Storm sounds
• Sound volume
• Storm fade timings
• Navigation interference

Server-side settings control gameplay mechanics such as storm duration, wind physics, damage, mob behaviour, sand accumulation and automatic storm triggering.

Biome Support
Desert Storms uses a data-driven biome tag system.

Supported biomes can be added through:

#desertstorms:storm_biomes

Biomes can be excluded through:

#desertstorms:storm_biome_blacklist

Vanilla Desert and Badlands variants are supported by default.

The mod can also automatically recognize many modded desert, badlands, wasteland and other arid biomes without requiring dedicated Java integrations.

Compatibility

Desert Storms is designed to support modded world generation through biome tags and automatic arid-biome detection.

Known compatible world-generation mods include:

• Biomes O' Plenty
• Terralith

Other biome mods can add support through the Desert Storms biome tags without requiring a dedicated compatibility patch.

Multiplayer (Pray)

Storm state, phases and major visual effects are synchronized between the server and connected players.

Gameplay mechanics such as wind physics, mob behaviour and sand accumulation are controlled by the server, while visual quality can be configured independently by each player.

Dependencies

Desert Storms does not require Lodestone or Rubidium Extra.

No additional dependency mods are required.

Commands

The mod includes commands for testing and administration:

• /sandstorm start phase <1-5> — starts a sandstorm at the selected phase
• /sandstorm stop — immediately stops the current sandstorm

Discord