Better Oceans

The game's sea is a flat blue plane with two sine waves in it. This gives it a surface.

Ripples that travel with the swell and never repeat. Sun glitter across the chop. Long lanes of wind reaching to the horizon. Surf that washes up the sand and drags back. Water that goes warm at sunset because the sky did, and grey under a storm because the light did.

What changes

• A real surface. Eight scales of drifting detail, none of them sharing an axis, a size or a speed - so there is no pattern to find and no tile to spot, however long you stare at it. Calm patches and rough patches, hundreds of metres across, so no two stretches look the same.
• It is lit by the game. Torches, lanterns, the sun, the moon, fog, shadows, reflections and the weather all reach the water the same way they reach everything else. Hold a torch at the water's edge and it lights the water.
• It behaves like water. Almost no reflection with the sun overhead, almost total reflection when the sun is low - which is why a real ocean is dark and blue at noon and blazes at sunset.
• A shoreline. The mod measures the seabed around you, so the surf knows where the sand is: a thin band of bubbles at the waterline that runs up the beach and back with the swell.

It does not change how anything floats

The game works out where the water is with a pair of sine waves, and every boat, bobber and floating crate rides on them. This mod keeps those numbers to the letter and reproduces the same waves, adding detail only in how they are lit. It checks this itself on startup and says so in the log.

Best with Living Skies

These two are built for each other. The sea is lit by the game's own light, so whatever Living Skies is doing overhead arrives on the water by itself:

• Sunrise and sunset - the ocean warms with the sky and the sun lays a path of broken light across it.
• Storms - the sea goes grey and hard as the cloud rolls in, and tears up into whitecaps.
• Night - dark water under stars, and the moon on the swell.

Neither needs the other. But a moving sky over a dead sea, or a living sea under a fixed noon, is half a view - together they are one.

Get it here: Living Skies

Making it yours

Set TuningMenu = true in yoxi.htf.water.cfg and press F9 in game for a panel of sliders - colour, ripples, glitter, foam, haze - and the sea changes as you drag. Save keeps your look. Off by default.

More from Yoxi

• Torch - a real torch item: fire in your fist, light and moving shadows
• Better Islands - three of the five islands rebuilt by hand
• CustomIslands Loader - the mod that runs custom islands
• CustomIslands Mapmaker Kit - build your own islands
• Living Skies - day-night cycle plus storms, rain, lightning and thunder. Pairs with this one
• HTF Day and Night - the calm-sky day-night cycle on its own

---

Built by Yoxi.