Compatibility
Vortex Dread does not plug into Minecraft's weather, it runs beside it. The tornado is its own entity, the funnel is drawn by its own renderer, and exactly two of the game's classes are modified, both on the client. So another mod collides with this one only where it paints the same thing at the same moment, and that list is four lines long.
The manifest declares no incompatibility. No blacklist of ids, no detection at load, no refusal to start. Two mods that both take over the look of a thunderstorm will launch together without a single error line, and the only place it shows is the sky, during a storm, by which point nobody is reading a log. That is what the choice costs. What it buys is that no player ever meets a game that will not open because of a neighbour.
Where things overlap
| What the other mod touches | What you get | Switch |
|---|---|---|
| The storm and its lighting | The cloud deck takes two series of flashes instead of one, and the sky changes colour twice, each on its own schedule. | rebuildStorms |
| The post-processing pass | Whoever writes last wins. Ours steps back when the tornado leaves, and it takes the neighbour's chain with it on the way out. | postEffect |
| The camera | The two displacements add up. A storm shake on top of a weapon's recoil gives a view nobody can follow. | screenShake |
| Weather damage | A block broken twice goes unnoticed, but a player lifted by two winds at once travels a good deal further than either intended. | liftPlayers |
Each of those values lives in vortexdread.json,
written out in full on the configuration page. None of them
needs the game restarted, only the file reloaded.
Shader packs
The funnel is drawn by the mod itself, through its own render types. It stays visible whatever pack is loaded, and with no pack at all. What a patched Photon adds on top is the inside: the storm cloud rebuilt as cumulus, and the lightning lighting the column's volume from within rather than multiplying the whole sky by a constant. Another pack leaves the funnel where it is and takes that internal light away. Nothing breaks, the scene is simply flatter, and the patch itself is described on its own page.
What it grew up with
Development happened inside a loaded profile rather than a bare game, which is the only way to find the friction before players do. Sodium and Iris ran throughout, with Lithium, FerriteCore, Krypton, ScalableLux, ImmediatelyFast, EntityCulling, MoreCulling, ThreadTweak, VMP and ServerCore around them, plus AmbientSounds, Sound Physics Remastered and PresenceFootsteps on the audio side. None of the thirty-two asked for a line of special-case code.
What causes no trouble at all
- Performance mods: they speed up the world's rendering, they do not paint the sky. The funnel goes through Fabric API's render events, which is the road Sodium respects.
- Occlusion mods: the renderer declares a box for the tornado that is taller and wider than the entity, dust skirt included, so a column with only its foot on screen does not blink out.
- Sound mods: the mod's sounds are registered like any others, and an engine that reverberates or occludes them handles them knowing nothing of where they came from.
- Terrain and biome mods: the tornado reads the heightmap to find the ground, and nothing else. An unfamiliar generator is no obstacle.
On the dependency side the mod deliberately stands alone: Fabric API is the only thing required, and Iris, Sodium, Lithium, FerriteCore and spark are merely suggested. The rest is on the installation page.