Elytra Aeronautics

TLDR; What does this mod do?

This mod has three main features:

1. When flying with elytra, the player will fly faster the higher they fly (similar as in real life, where air density is lower at high altitudes, decreasing air drag).
2. Adds additional cloud layers indicating when fly speed starts to increase and when it ceases to increase, acting as a reference point for height and speed.
3. Features 1 and 2 are FULLY customizable: you can add and setup as many cloud layers as you want, and modify extra flight speed or disable it altogether.

Notes for multiplayer

• When playing on a server, setting the gamerule 'disableElytraMovementCheck' to true helps with jittering and position inconsistency.

List of other features that the mod offers

- You can configure a flight pitch angle to align towards when pressing 'shift' while gliding, the alignment speed can be changed, or you can have this feature compleately disabled.

What's new in the latest version?

More insight into the mod

Elytra flying

If you are like me, a player who likes to explore the world, and travel very far away from the spawn to find unique generation and breathtaking landscapes to build your base and farms around, you might end up with your buildings spreaded across a 30,000-block-wide world.

The average player would be smart and link everything with a nether highway system. But I personally find elytra travelling very enjoyable, and for an endgame item which purpose is to specifically make travelling more convenient, it lacks utility when it is used in long-distance travel.

The premise behind this mod is to make elytra travel more useful when covering large distances, making the player move at airplane speeds when flying at airplane heights.

When using Elytra Aeronautics with default settings, flight speed increases with altitude following this curve:

As you can see, there is no speed increment from y=0 to y=250.
This is to not make low altitude flight go easily out of control, again, if you are like me and use the elytra to travel just 20 blocks across your base, you don't have to worry about reaching MACH5 when going for some potatoes.

Beyond the 250 blocks of altitude mark, flight speed increases linearly up to its maximum at y=1000. At this altitude, cruise speed (what I call flight speed at a constant 0° angle to the ground) is around 250 block/second, matching commercial flight average speed.

Keeping it vanilla

When developing a mod my intention is to make everything feel as vanilla as possible, since I make mods for myself that put in the game features that I feel are missing, to later use in my own survival worlds, this time I took a step further and published it.

When making this one I came across a problem: "How could I make some sort of altimeter and speedometer without adding fancy items or any GUI?", because some kind of guide is needed when flying far up from the ground, and using the debug (F3) screen is not very immersive.

After giving it some thought, I got an idea: using clouds as some kind of reference point for the player's vertical position.

By default, Elytra Aeronautics adds two additional cloud layers, one at the middle point of the speed curve (y=250) and another at the end of the speed curve (y=1000);
these serve as an altitude marker like previously mentioned and as a speed marker, as these will appear moving faster relative to the player when travelling at high speeds.

This leads me to the second and third features of the mod, clouds and customization.

Clouds and customization

Using the config command (/ean) you can add as many cloud layers as you wish, and use different cloud types and render distances for each layer individually.

"How did we get here?"

Furthermore, this mod adds "LOD clouds", these clouds will render as "Fast clouds" when far away from them, and as "Fancy clouds" when close to them.

You can even make it so when a cloud layer is far away enough from the player it stops rendering, so you can set up hundreds of cloud layers and lose almost no performance.

As previously mentioned you can either configure each layer individually, or all of them at once, providing full access to the additional cloud functionality of the mod.

Known Issues

• There are compatibility issues with Lithium (Sodium works fine).
• Very minor issues with cloud rendering.
• Right now clouds can be seen at the Nether and End dimensions, this will be a toggleable feature in the future (when life gives you lemons...)

Future development

• Expect the mod to be ported to future versions.
• I will always try to get rid of all big and medium sized issues before I add more content.
• Expansion updates are planned but these might take longer to be released.

F.A.Q.

Will this ever be ported to Forge?

I can't tell for sure, I definetly want to finish releasing all major planned expansions and polishing the mod before getting it to Forge.

Can I port it to Forge?

Yes, you can, but you have to respect the mod's license and credit the original work.

Will this mod be ever ported to an older version?

Right now, I can almost assure you that I won't, but, if I see a lot of people requesting it, I might make a single version for each of the most requested older MC versions.

Support

You can support me by simply downloading the mod and sharing it with friends!