Dynamic Surroundings Rebirth by uawiegrfv

Dynamic Surroundings Rebirth brings the classic Dynamic Surroundings experience to modern Minecraft, rebuilt for Forge & NeoForge. A port by uawyiegrfv of the beloved Dynamic Surroundings by OreCruncher.

No server-side mod required — you can add this to your pack and play on public servers. Note that without server support, a few features don't apply: other players' footprints, damage-number sync and village ambience are not available in this port. It is otherwise fully client-side.

What is this?

A faithful port of Dynamic Surroundings (original mod by OreCruncher) to modern Minecraft on Forge & NeoForge. It restores most of the original 1.12.2-era experience and adds new content of its own — a modern remake of the classic ambient/atmosphere mod.

Compared to the original, this port:

• Reworked for modern Minecraft — rebuilt on the modern modding stack (Forge & NeoForge).
• Restores the majority of the 1.12.2 feature set — the ambience you remember, back on a modern version.
• Adds new content — including a dynamic weather system, exclusive Deep Dark ambience, a rewritten shader-driven aurora, leaf-wind gusts, leaf-litter footsteps, treasure-distance readouts, quick volume control and more.

Features

• Dynamic weather system — rain and snow have an intensity that rises, peaks and fades, rolled per event and shaped by your biome, its climate and the season. That one number drives the sound, the fog, the sky, the clouds, the wet ground and the traces the weather leaves behind.
• Weather sound — rain volume follows the intensity, thunder includes the distant rumbles of a storm, wind rises with the rain, and rain on glass, metal and wood has its own sound.
• Wind — a wind with a direction and a speed, both changing during a storm. Rain leans with it, drawn in sheets aligned with the wind, and the wind sound is driven by the same gusts, so what you hear moves with what you see.
• Sky events — between the rain come overcast days and skies that slowly clear; as a storm builds, the world darkens and the sun and stars fade.
• Weather fog — rain fog, fog that lingers after the rain, morning fog whose type changes with the season, biome fog that can carry the biome's colour, haze that thickens with altitude, and fog at the bedrock layer.
• Drips from eaves — water drips from the edges of roofs and other blocks in three rhythms: single drops, bursts and a steady run. The heavier the rain, the denser they fall; they carry their own sounds, and they keep falling for a while after the rain stops.
• Water on plants — rain forms beads along the upper edges of grass and leaves and slides off them; most run to the ground, a few rest at the tip and then fall whole.
• Icicles — icicles grow under roofs while it snows, in five sizes and three shapes. A full-grown one may let go and shatter, and a new one grows elsewhere under the eaves. When the snow stops they melt, shrinking back toward the roof edge while meltwater drips from the tip.
• Snow on plants — snow settles on grass and flowers, building from a single dot to a small clump to a thin sheet. It melts away at its own pace once the snow stops, and rain arriving on top of it clears the whole lot at once.
• Morning dew — dew forms on plants in the early morning, is thickest just before sunrise and dries by mid-morning; how much appears depends on the biome.
• Desert sandstorms and Nether dust rain — sandstorms with a yellow cast to the screen in deserts, and dust rain in the Nether.
• Weather debug command — /dsprecip lock <0 to 1.0> locks the precipitation intensity, handy for testing and previews.
• Aurora — the northern lights appear over cold biomes around midnight, rendered as a shader-driven curtain with vertical ray structure and vivid spectrum colours.
• Enhanced sound — reverb and occlusion in a background thread; sounds stay audible behind walls and large obstacles.
• Magma sizzle & hot blocks — rain hisses on lava, steam rises from hot blocks, and fire/bubbles emanate from lava sources.
• Season support — with Serene Seasons installed, the clock shows the real season, morning fog becomes seasonal, and frost breath follows seasonal temperature.
• Biome ambience — forests, plains, jungles, oceans and more, with smooth transitions as you explore. Works with biome mods like Biomes O' Plenty and Terralith via convention tags.
• Material footsteps — surface-specific step sounds for every material, including jump, landing and walk-through-brush sounds.
• Player condition sounds — heartbeat when low on health, hunger rumbles, jump and landing sounds, crafting, bow/shield/crossbow and hotbar switching.
• Footprints — leave prints in sand, snow, mud and more, in several styles.
• Underwater acoustics — sounds crossing water are muffled and quieter; diving dampens what you hear.
• Particles — fireflies, frost breath, water ripples, footprints and more.
• Crit words & damage numbers, background thunder, waterfall effects, falling-block dust and held-torch crackle.
• Deep Dark ambience — a low drone, a faint persistent heartbeat and intermittent Sculk clicks.
• Leaf-wind gusts — intermittent leaf rustling in wooded biomes, more frequent at night.
• Leaf-litter footsteps — several landing crunch and walking step variants.
• Treasure distance — the horizontal distance to the target is shown on explorer maps.
• Sound-options sliders — Footsteps and Biomes volume in the vanilla Sound Options menu (0% restores vanilla footstep sounds).
• Quick sound volume — hold Ctrl+backtick to adjust recently played sounds on the fly.
• Compass & clock HUD — shown while holding the corresponding item.
• Individual sound configuration — fine-tune every sound from a config screen.
• Mod compatibility — Distant Horizons, Iris and Oculus, Particle Rain, Simple Clouds, Better Clouds, BadOptimizations, the Sounds mod, Embeddium, Sodium and Serene Seasons are all recognised: DSR works out who owns the rain, the clouds and the fog and stands down when it is not its turn, and says so in the log.

Requirements

• Forge or NeoForge — pick the build matching your Minecraft version (see the Files tab).
• Cloth Config API
• Architectury API (NeoForge builds only)

License & Credits

MIT License. Ported by uawyiegrfv, based on the original Dynamic Surroundings by OreCruncher.Audio assets come from several sources under different licences, among them CC0, CC BY 3.0 and CC BY 4.0; each one is credited to its author in the repository's CREDITS.md and in the sound definitions themselves.

AI Disclosure: This port is developed with assistance from AI tools (Claude Code). AI-assisted code is provided "as is" and may contain bugs; please report issues on the GitHub tracker and use at your own risk.