Thunderstorm

A Thunderstorm is Rain and a Windy Day overlapping. It needs the wind at 20 mph or better while the rain is at half intensity, and it falls apart as soon as the wind drops to 16 mph or the rain thins past 40 percent. Neither half can be summoned, so you are waiting for two independent weather rolls to line up, which is why storms with lightning feel much rarer than plain rain. A Weather Radio reports one when it is happening.

Every strike announces itself first. Electricity gathers on a tile for four seconds before the bolt lands, and during that window the charge can move: walk within a tile or so of it and it transfers to you instead. Only two charges exist at a time, so the sky is never as busy as the noise suggests.

• Only tiles with open sky above them can be picked. Anything under solid blocks cannot be targeted at all.
• Platforms do not count as cover. A platform roof gives you nothing.
• Height wins. If the chosen tile sits under a tree or a pool, the strike moves up to the treetop or the water surface instead.
• Metal attracts it. Ores, bars and most things crafted from them are favored, which is why a stack of Chain works as a lightning rod.
• If every player in the world is dead, lightning stops until someone respawns.

A bolt hits a player for somewhere between 40 and 400 base damage depending on world difficulty, and it hits anything that is not a player for 500 to 1500. That gap is the interesting part. Lightning deletes ordinary surface enemies outright, which means a storm quietly clears your surface for you and also means an unattended farm full of metal decoration is a bad idea.

The entire visible column of the bolt deals damage, not only the tile at the bottom, so several enemies stacked in a line all take the hit. Water conducts: stand in a pool within about 35 tiles of a strike and it hurts you even though the bolt landed elsewhere. Trees throw off two to five flaming sparks when hit, each worth around 10 damage plus a few seconds of burning. Those sparks count as ranged damage but ignore your ranged bonuses, so they stay small forever.

The safe answer is a real roof. Solid blocks make everything beneath them untargetable, so an arena with a proper ceiling removes lightning from the fight while keeping the rain fishing bonus you get from the same weather. If you would rather use the storm, place metal well away from where you stand and let it pull strikes toward it. Fighting in the open is survivable, but you are sharing the arena with something that hits harder than most bosses and does not care whose side it is on.

If the flashes are uncomfortable to look at, the experimental settings include a switch that turns the flash effect off without changing any of the mechanics.

In a world running both the Drunk and For the Worthy seeds, with Remix switched off, the storm drops boulders instead. They roll along the ground and crush you on contact, which makes the surface genuinely unusable while it lasts. Music behaves oddly too: the surface Snow, Corruption and Crimson tracks keep playing as normal, and a Sandstorm running at the same time takes priority over the storm entirely.