Cirrus Mod

Cirrus is an atmospheric mod that completely overhauls the sky in your game to make your world look much more mesmerizing and immersive. Let us take a detailed look at all of the features of this amazing mod.

Multi-layered Clouds

Cirrus completely overhauls the clouds in your game. When you open up a world with this mod installed, this is the first change you are going to notice. Clouds now exist in three individual layers. When viewed from the ground, this makes the clouds appear more dense and volumetric.

This is an effect that most shader packs strive to achieve. While many packs make clouds truly volumetric, others like Nostalgia make clouds dual-layered. This mod achieves a closer level-of-depth with no impact on performance. The three different clouds layers all move across the world at different speeds, making the sky look a lot more lively.

The Night Sky

The multi-layered clouds is just one among the many features added by the mod. The true beauty of the sky reveals itself as the night arrives. The sky gets filled with stars and shooting stars. Effects like auroras and visible galaxies makes the sky look like a magical fluid matrix.

The Milky Way

If you are in any non-cold biome in your world, this is what the night sky will look like. The sky is filled with a glowing strip, which is the Milky Way galaxy. The galactic ring appears to rotate around the sky, as the world rotates through the day-night cycle. We will showcase this well below.

Auroras

As you traverse through cold biomes, you will notice another mesmerizing sight - Auroras. The sky gets circled with a cyan-shaded halo effect, which makes the sky look truly magical. Note that this feature is limited only to cold biomes.

Sky Rotation

Click on the arrows in the carousal above to see how the Milky Way appears to rotate along the sky, as time progresses into the night.

Rain and Snow

When it rains/snows, the particle effects thus involved gets culled beyond the highest layer of cloud. If you use an elytra and fly over the highest cloud layer, you will notice that rain/snow particle do not exist beyond it.

Realistic Thunder

With this mod installed, lighting bolts appear to be a lot more thinner and more branched, very much similar to real-life lighting. And when lightning strikes, the appears to get darker, while clouds and terrain elements near to the strike location appear to flash bright.

The End Sky

The mod also alters the End sky to make it look a lot more alive. For the effect to be visible, you have to move towards the outer End islands, where you will notice a glowing matrix constantly evolving across the entire sky. This purple themed glowing matrix accurately matches the End theme.

Conclusion

At the time of writing this article, Cirrus is less than a month old. Even at this early stage, the animated sky does not seem to have any impact on game performance. We can definitely expect to see more features being added to the mod in future updates. Many of the current features included in the mod, like the night sky star density, can be configures in the mod settings.

Note that the mod requires both Architectury API and YetAnotherConfigLib to be installed alongside, for proper functionality.