What it does
Pretty Rain changes how weather looks in Minecraft. It swaps the default rain and snow for particle effects. It's a port of Particle Rain, which started on Fabric, and Leclowndu93150 is the author.
The project is listed under the Game Mechanics category, and everything it describes is about how weather looks and moves.
Weather effects
Rain particles fall at an angle, as if the wind were pushing them. When a storm hits, the wind gets stronger. Snow particles rotate slowly as they come down.
Dry biomes get sandstorms. Dust and shrubs blow through deserts and similar areas, and modded biomes are supported too.
Rain and water particles also pick up the biome's water tint, so the colour follows the biome you're standing in.
Water and ground details
Ripples show up when rain lands on water. They match the resolution of your resource pack. Streaks appear when rain hits a wall made of a hard material. Ground fog sits just above sea level in humid biomes.
There's one more setting called Foggier Fog. The project calls it experimental and laggy, and it's disabled by default.
Configuration
If you've Mod Menu installed, you can change various aspects of how the particles behave. Every effect can be toggled on and off.
There's a catch for NeoForge players. The config screen isn't available there yet, and the project says it'll be added soon.
If the particles cost you frames, the project's own advice is to lower the radius, the density or the maximum particle amount in the config. By default the mod spawns up to 1500 particles. The author says most systems should handle that without issue. No benchmark numbers are given, so treat that as the author's expectation and not a measured result.
Compatibility
Pretty Rain supports two loaders, NeoForge and Forge. The listed Minecraft versions are 1.19.2, 1.20.1, 1.21.1, 1.21.5 and 1.21.6. Real talk, that's a list of specific versions. Don't read it as a continuous range, because other point releases in between aren't named.
The mod is marked as required on the client side and unsupported on the server side. It's released under the MIT License.
Who it suits
This is for players on the loaders and versions above who want weather that looks different from the vanilla defaults. So it fits people who like a bit of atmosphere, like angled rain, drifting sand and fog near the ground. If you play on NeoForge and want a settings screen, know that it isn't there yet.
