Features at a glance

• Dozens of new weathers
• Reworked visuals for rain, snow, lightning strikes and sandstorms
• Expanded weather choice in most cities and biomes
• Assorted tweaks (timescale, wind and more)

DETAILED OVERVIEW

All-new weathers and cloud formations

• Adds 10 new "partly cloudy" weathers (vanilla has 5).
• Adds 8 new "cloudy" weathers (vanilla has 3).
• Adds 2 new "overcast" weathers (vanilla has 2).
• Adds 1 new "rain" cloud formation (vanilla has 1).
• Adds brand new Rainstorm weathers.
• Adds brand new Snowstorm weathers.
• All "partly cloudy" and "cloudy" cloud formations have multiple associated weather variations (like in vanilla: Clear, HazyLight, MistDense and MistLight).
• Most new weathers have special variations used in major cities and settlements (New Atlantis, Neon, Akila, Gagarin, New Homestead, etc.) which keep their unique image spaces and volumetric lighting settings.
• All vanilla weathers and cloud formations can still be encountered, but there will be a lot more variety now.

Precipitation - visual rework and new rainy/snowy weathers

Dozens of hours have been spent tweaking and perfecting the particle effects; the result is rainy and snowy weathers that are more intense, and hopefully more realistic than vanilla, while trying to keep the performance as close to vanilla as possible.

• Adjusted amount, size, transparency, wind and gravity of rain particles
• Adjusted amount, size, color, positioning, wind and gravity of snow particles.
• Removed distant snow sheets texture in favor of increasing snow flake density.
• Increased audio volume of precipitation.

PERFORMANCE

• Rain weathers: no noticeable performance loss.
• HeavyRain weathers: very light performance impact (1-2fps loss compared to vanilla Heavy Rain)
• Rainstorm weathers: moderate performance impact (4-6fps, which used to be the performance impact of Heavy Rain weathers before update 1.2). I tried my best to optimize these weathers, tweaking all variables as much as I could, but obviously, it's not possible to have more intense particle effects and weathers (which is one of the goals of this mod) without some performance impact. This was all tested on my config which is probably CPU-bottlenecked for this game (3700X + 9070XT), so your mileage may vary.

Thunderstorms - visual rework

• Adds a glow around lightning strikes.
• Slightly adjust the positioning of lightning strikes : they can now spawn slightly further or closer away from you, as well as further away from the center of your screen, sometimes behind you.

Sandstorms - visual rework

• Tweaked positioning, size, speed and transparency of sand gusts.
• Tweaked wind force and variation for heavy sandstorms.
• Lightly increased audio volume for sandstorm weathers.
• Regular sandstorms, heavy sandstorms and the unique Cydonia red dust storm have all been modified with their own new values.

Climate adjustments

• Adds some vanilla AND some new weathers from this mod to places that did not have them before (e.g. New Atlantis didn't have all variations of cloudy or partly cloudy weathers).
• This includes most cities and settlements in the game: New Atlantis, Akila, Neon, Gagarin, New Homestead, Red Mile, Paradiso and more. NOTE: there is currently a bug in the vanilla game where rain audio will not be played when fast travelling to an already explored place (when it does a short loading screen instead of a long one?). For this reason, I chose to not add rain to certain places (notably New Atlantis, as you often end up with completely silent rain when fast travelling to different districts of the city). If Bethesda ever fixes this bug, I'll add rain to more places.
• Adjusts and expands the pool of possible weathers for most biomes (inspired by Climate Change).
• Vanilla-friendly: planets and moons without atmosphere are unchanged and don't have any new weathers. Earth is unchanged.

Assorted tweaks

• Slows down the timescale (day-night cycle) of the game to 60% of the vanilla speed, for longer sunrises and sunset, and (slightly) less harsh transitions between day and night.
• Affects both local time and UT time equally.
• This is, as far as I know, the ONLY way to do longer sunrises and sunsets. Any mod that says it changes the duration of sunsets and sunrises, without touching the timescale, does not work (I've tested them). Adjusting sunset start and end times in biome settings or gameplay settings of the Creation Kit does not work and only impacts NPC routines and the like. If you think I've missed something here, let me know!
• Adjusts the maximum duration of weathers in consequence, and weather changes should be more frequent than in vanilla. (Feedback welcome to fine tune this!)
• Reworks 1 vanilla "partly cloudy" cloud formation. (I only reworked one which I think looked a bit worse than the others, all the other ones can still be encountered in the game).
• Light adjustment to "Clear" VolumetricFog settings.
• Slight tweaks to wind (strength, variation, etc.)
• Faster eye adaptation speed (aka auto exposure).

Compatibility

• Can in theory be used with Royal Weathers or Climate Change, but if you load my mod first, you won't get any of my new weathers. If you load it last, you would just get the tweaks and textures of Royal Weathers for example. I have not tested combining them, but I recommend choosing just one of those three mods, as they all do similar things.
• Cloud retextures like Sharper Clouds for Starfield are NOT recommended. I designed my weathers with vanilla textures in mind and some of them look very wrong with upscaled/sharpened textures. If you see lots of visible texture glitches/artifacts, this might be why.
• Compatible with Immersive Star Colors
• Compatible with Northern Lights - Aurora Borealis
• Compatible with mods that alter the timescale if you load them after this mod
• No other known incompatibilities.

Author's note

If you have any feedback, please don't hesitate to contact me on NexusMods (same username). I do not have an Xbox to test this mod, please let me know if anything is wrong with the console version. I'm particularly interested to know if the performance is acceptable on a console. Thanks for playing!