A living world: birds, butterflies, auroras and morning mist in Minecraft

Nothing to fight, collect or craft: only what makes a place feel inhabited. It all happens around you, and none of it changes the game.

Download .jar Modrinth CurseForge

Part of Cassonade, a free vanilla+ mod for Minecraft 26.3 (Fabric)

A flock of geese flying in a V across a clear blue sky, seen from the ground

The Milky Way, a faint band high in the night sky, above an open plain with flowers in the grass

A birch forest at dawn, the far trees fading into a light mist

A plain at midday, full of flowers, with pollen drifting in the air and a butterfly among them

How it works

Minecraft's world is beautiful, and strangely empty. Now something is always going on.

In the sky

The sky is a deep blue overhead, paling towards the horizon, and distant land melts into the very sky behind it, orange beside a sunset and blue by day, rather than into white.
Flocks cross the sky by clear day, several at once and at very different heights: a V or a loose group of geese, a few black crows, and white gulls among them as you near the coast. They fly on their way without following you.
Starlings: very rarely, in the last hour of a clear day, a cloud of hundreds folds and swells in the sky for about a minute, then goes on.
Milky Way: a faint band across the night, placed and shaped like the real one, with its bright heart and dark rift. It turns with the stars.
Auroras hang to the north, green and violet, every other clear night over snowy land.
Shooting stars cross the sky now and then on a clear night.
Heat lightning flickers silently, low on the horizon, on some warm evenings.

In the air

Butterflies flit around flowers near you by clear day.
Pollen drifts around grass and trees by day, mixed with dry dust in savannas.
Dust falls slowly from cave ceilings, where your torches catch it.
Breath shows in the cold: in snowy lands, players and villagers breathe out small puffs of mist.
Fish leap out of lakes and rivers at dawn and dusk, with a splash each way, louder the closer they are.
Morning mist: now and then, about one morning in eight, the land wakes in a mist that hides the sky and the distance, then lifts as the sun climbs, thinner up high and gone underground.
Up high, specks carried by the wind rush past.
After the rain, the trees keep dripping for a minute, from every leaf the rain reached.

What you hear

Under water, sounds turn muffled and quieter while your head is below the surface, seem to come from everywhere, those from above the water grow faint, and only a flooded cave or a ceiling of blocks gives them a dull echo; the music and the menus stay clear.
Geese and gulls call as a flock passes, louder the closer it is, and a flock flying high goes by in silence.
Robins sing by day among the trees of the warm lands, some close by and others far off, joined by cuckoos in forests.
Owls call in forests at night.
A wolf: on full moon nights in the taiga, a lone wolf howls far off, once in a while.
Thunder comes after the flash, later and duller the farther the lightning struck.
Rain on the roof: under a roof, the rain and the thunder are muffled; leaves are no roof.
Caves send every sound back as an echo, short in a passage, long in a great hall.
Waves grow all around you as you near a shore: a dull roar from afar, clear at the water's edge, where a line of foam runs up the shore with each wave and water splashes where it breaks. Out at sea, far from any shore, a quiet swell remains.
Frogs croak all around in swamps, from dusk until dawn.
Crickets sing through warm nights, and grasshoppers in savannas by day.

At sea

The horizon: the sea ends on a clean curve, and the sun and moon set behind it instead of showing through the water.
Far water turns opaque, hiding the kelp and sunken structures vanilla leaves lit in the distance.
Its color follows the light: the sea darkens and greys at dusk, and keeps little of its blue at night.
Under water, the sky only shows when you look up, as in a real sea, and never through rock. The distance is dim, dimmer the deeper you go, while cloudy water and drifting silt, carried back and forth by the swell, close in the view. Your eyes get used to the water in 3 seconds, not 30, and you can still find your way.

And the bees

Bees are drawn smaller, adults and babies alike, closer to the size of a real one next to a flower.

Questions

Does it change how the game plays?

No. Birds and butterflies are only pictures, with nothing behind them: they can't be touched, hunted or hurt, and they drop nothing. Mist never hides the way.

Does it work on a server without the mod?

Yes: it all happens on your own computer, so it works anywhere. Each player sees their own flocks.

Can I turn the sounds down?

Yes: they all follow the game's Ambient/Environment slider, in the Music & Sound options.