🌧️ Real Rain
Real Rain adds immersive, AAA-style rain and storm ambience to Factorio.
Rain no longer feels like a flat effect. Storms can build up in stages, wind can shift, ground splashes react to the surface below them, thunder rolls through the world, lightning flashes across the screen, and wet weather can affect solar power, pollution, and fires.
From light drizzle to heavy rain, thunderstorms, and rare monsoon events, Real Rain makes Nauvis feel more alive.
⚙️ What It Does
Real Rain adds a full weather ambience system built around staged storms and atmospheric effects.
Weather can move through different stages such as drizzle, rain, heavy rain, storm, and monsoon. Rain visuals are layered with foreground rain, midground rain, mist, ground splashes, and post-rain ambience so storms feel like they roll in and fade out naturally instead of instantly turning on and off.
Thunder and lightning are also linked together. Lightning uses a cleaner bolt-free blue-white flash, while thunder uses layered sound behaviour for distant rumbles, close cracks, rolling thunder tails, and heavier monsoon impacts.
The mod also includes optional gameplay-light weather effects such as reduced solar output during rain, pollution washout, and fire extinguishing with hiss effects.
✅ Features
- 🌧️ Staged weather system
- 🌦️ Drizzle, rain, heavy rain, storm, and monsoon events
- 🌫️ Layered rain sheets and mist ambience
- 💦 Tile-aware ground splashes
- 🧱 Harder splashes on concrete and built surfaces
- 🌱 Softer splashes on dirt, grass, and natural terrain
- 🌊 Ripple-style effects around water
- 🌬️ Wind gust direction changes during storms
- 🌩️ Thunderstorm ambience with layered thunder
- ⚡ Bolt-free blue-white lightning flashes
- 🔊 Linked thunder and lightning timing
- 🌧️ Rain-only forced weather mode
- 🌩️ Thunder + rain forced weather mode
- ⛈️ Full thunderstorm forced weather mode
- 🌫️ Post-rain puddle ripples and drip ambience
- 🌲 Area-aware ambience around forests, factories, and water
- ☀️ Optional solar power reduction during rain
- 🏭 Optional pollution washout while raining
- 🔥 Optional fire extinguishing during wet weather
- 🔊 Safe sound volume clamping
- ⚙️ Runtime settings for intensity, presets, volume, visuals, and UPS mode
- 🧰 Admin and debug commands for testing weather
- ✅ Factorio 2.0 compatible
- ✅ Works as a standalone weather mod
🌦️ Weather Stages
Real Rain uses staged weather instead of a single basic rain state.
| Stage | Feel |
|---|---|
| Drizzle | Light rain, softer ambience, gentle splashes |
| Rain | Normal rainfall with stronger ground and audio presence |
| Heavy Rain | Thicker rain, stronger splashes, more atmosphere |
| Storm | Strong rain, thunder, wind, and lightning ambience |
| Monsoon | Rare intense weather with heavier rain and stronger thunder layers |
Storms can build up, peak, and fade away naturally depending on the active weather sequence.
🌩️ Thunder and Lightning
Thunder and lightning are designed to feel more cinematic without adding visible lightning bolt sprites.
Lightning uses a short blue-white screen flash instead of a bolt graphic. This keeps the effect clean and avoids odd-looking lightning sprites while still making storms feel powerful.
Thunder can play in multiple styles:
- Distant rumbles
- Close cracks
- Rolling thunder tails
- Heavy monsoon impacts
- Linked thunder after lightning flashes
This makes storms feel more alive without turning every rain event into constant noise.
🎮 Forced Weather Commands
Real Rain includes useful admin/debug commands for testing the weather in-game.
Main command
/real-rain status
Shows current Real Rain weather status.
Force weather
/real-rain clear 300
/real-rain drizzle 240
/real-rain rain 240
/real-rain thunder-rain 240
/real-rain thunderstorm 240
/real-rain heavy 240
/real-rain storm 240
/real-rain monsoon 240
Quick aliases
/rrrain 300
/rrthunderrain 300
/rrstorm 300
/rrthunderstorm 300
| Command | Behaviour |
|---|---|
/real-rain rain 240 |
Rain only, no thunder or lightning |
/real-rain thunder-rain 240 |
Rain with thunder sounds, no lightning flash |
/real-rain thunderstorm 240 |
Rain, lightning flash, and linked thunder |
/real-rain monsoon 240 |
Heavy monsoon-style weather |
🧪 Thunder / Lightning Test Commands
These commands are useful when testing sound balance and storm feel.
/real-rain thunder close
/real-rain thunder roll
/real-rain lightning close
/real-rain strike close
/real-rain strike monsoon
/real-rain thunder-test
Short aliases are also available:
/rrthunder close
/rrlightning close
/rrstrike monsoon
/rrtest
/real-rain thunder-test plays the thunder bank in sequence so distant, close, rolling, and monsoon thunder layers can be checked quickly.
⚙️ Settings
Real Rain includes runtime settings so you can tune the look, sound, and performance.
| Setting | What It Does |
|---|---|
| Real Rain Enabled | Turns the weather system on or off |
| AAA Preset | Chooses the overall rain/storm feel |
| Rain Intensity | Controls the strength of rain effects |
| Wind Strength | Controls storm wind movement |
| Ground Splashes | Enables general splash effects |
| Tile Splashes | Enables tile-aware splash behaviour |
| Biome Ambience | Adds ambience around forests, factories, and water |
| Wind Sound | Enables wind audio during weather |
| UPS Mode | Tunes performance cost |
| Nauvis Only | Limits Real Rain to Nauvis |
| Storm Stages | Enables staged weather sequences |
| Monsoon Chance | Controls chance of rare monsoon events |
| Post-Rain Effects | Enables puddle/drip ambience after rain |
| Thunder Sound | Enables thunder audio |
| Rain Volume | Controls rain volume |
| Thunder Volume | Controls thunder volume |
| Thunder Layering | Enables richer thunder layering |
| Lightning Visuals | Enables lightning flash visuals |
| Fire Extinguishing | Allows rain to extinguish fires |
| Solar Reduction | Allows rain to reduce solar output |
| Pollution Washout | Allows rain to clean some pollution |
🌧️ Presets
| Preset | Description |
|---|---|
| Subtle | Lighter rain and ambience for quiet saves or large factories |
| Balanced | Recommended default for normal gameplay |
| Storm | Stronger weather presence with more dramatic storms |
| Monsoon | Heavier cinematic weather for intense atmosphere |
🚀 Performance Modes
| Mode | Description |
|---|---|
| Cinematic | Stronger visuals and ambience for screenshots or smaller saves |
| Balanced | Recommended default |
| UPS Saver | Lighter effect density for large factories and multiplayer |
For big multiplayer servers or megabases, use Balanced or UPS Saver.
☀️ Optional Weather Effects
Real Rain is mainly an atmosphere mod, but it can also add light weather interaction.
Optional effects include:
- Reduced solar output while raining
- Pollution washout during wet weather
- Rain extinguishing fires
- Hiss smoke and sound effects when fire is put out by rain
These systems are configurable, so you can keep the mod visual-only or allow rain to interact with the world a little more.
🔗 Compatibility
Real Rain is designed as a standalone weather mod.
It should work with:
- Vanilla Factorio 2.0
- Space Age
- Multiplayer servers
- Most normal modded games
Real Rain is marked as incompatible with some other rain/weather mods to avoid duplicate weather systems running at the same time.
Known incompatible weather mods include:
- Dynamic Rain
- Nauvis Rain
- SEN Weather
This helps prevent overlapping rain effects, duplicated sounds, or conflicting weather logic.
🧪 Behaviour Notes
- Real Rain mainly runs on Nauvis by default
- Nauvis-only mode can be changed in settings
- Weather can be forced with commands for testing
- Rain-only mode has no thunder or lightning
- Thunder + rain mode has thunder but no lightning flash
- Thunderstorm mode includes rain, lightning flash, and linked thunder
- Lightning uses a screen flash, not a visible bolt sprite
- Sound volumes are safely clamped
- Fire extinguishing, solar reduction, and pollution washout are optional
- The mod is designed to be atmospheric without replacing core Factorio gameplay
📌 Design Goal
The goal of Real Rain is to make Factorio weather feel more alive, dramatic, and believable while still fitting the game.
It is meant to sit between vanilla Factorio and a more cinematic industrial world:
- More atmosphere
- More weather movement
- Better storm audio
- Cleaner lightning
- Tile-aware splashes
- Stronger immersion
- Tunable performance
- Optional gameplay-light weather effects
Real Rain is not meant to become a full survival overhaul.
It is made to make your factory world feel wet, stormy, and alive.
☕ Support
Enjoying the mod and want to support my work?
You can buy me a coffee here:
Any support helps me keep improving and polishing my Factorio mods.
🙏 Credits
Mod maintained and polished by Squishy1870.
Real Rain was rebuilt and expanded as a standalone weather package using the supplied Dynamic Rain reference package as a base reference.
Thunder and storm sound layers are based on curated Mixkit thunder and storm sound effects, processed for game use with OGG conversion, normalisation, distant rumble treatment, echo tails, and close-strike compression.
Factorio is made by Wube Software. This is an independent fan-made mod and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Wube Software.
📜 License
GNU General Public License v3.0