Wind

Wind is a background number the game updates constantly, and more hangs off it than most players notice. Nearly everything it touches is cosmetic: cloud speed, swaying grass and hanging furniture, the motion on the surface of water, how often leaves come off trees. But three separate weather events read the same value, so knowing where it sits tells you what the world is about to do.

Speed runs from 0 to 60 mph and blows from either the west or the east. Every readout in the game, from the Weather Radio and the Fish Finder up through the PDA, Cell Phone and Shellphone, gives the direction the air is coming from rather than where it is going. A reading of 25 mph W means you are about to be pushed to the right of the screen, since west is the left side of the map.

• At 20 mph a Windy Day begins, and it holds until the speed falls under 16 mph.
• Above 30 mph the game starts rolling for a Sandstorm in the Desert.
• 20 mph plus rain at half intensity turns the weather into a Thunderstorm.
• Wind falls to nothing during a Lantern Night, unless you are holding it up with the Journey Mode controls.

In a generated world the target speed is capped at 40 mph even though the scale reaches higher, so the top of the range only exists on the title screen. Worlds are created with the wind under 20 mph, which still leaves about a 1 in 400 chance of loading into a fresh world with a Windy Day already in progress.

The game tracks two values, a current speed and a target, and the current one drifts toward the target rather than snapping to it. Every 15 to 45 seconds the wind gusts, which nudges the target up or down by a random amount. A second counter ticks down with each gust, and when it empties the next gust is an extreme one that moves the target much further; where the target lands then decides how many ordinary gusts pass before the next extreme one. If a gust flips the direction, there is a two in three chance the following adjustment flips it straight back, which is why direction is stickier than the constant fluctuation makes it look.

Only the target speed is saved with the world. On reload, the current speed is set equal to the target, so the wind you logged out in is rarely the wind you log back into. If you are waiting on a Sandstorm, a quick reload can move you closer or further away with no warning.

Mighty Wind is the only place wind touches your character directly, and it comes from Sandstorms. The push scales with the wind speed, gets roughly a third stronger once you pass 25 mph, and increases by half again while you are jumping or falling, which is why a routine gap jump in a Desert lands somewhere you did not aim for. Holding left or right cuts it by a fifth, so moving beats standing. Running hard into the wind even kicks up the same dust particles as Hermes Boots. On a mount, moving sideways at a steady height cancels the effect entirely.

The Windy Day is mostly scenery: stronger gusts, faster clouds, leaves everywhere. It brings Windy Balloons drifting across the surface, which pop for novelty furniture, and kites lean with it, pulling further out the harder it blows. Its real value is as the first half of two other events. A windy morning means a Sandstorm is possible if it keeps climbing, and a Thunderstorm if rain arrives, so it is worth noticing rather than dismissing as weather.

There is a switch in the code for wind affecting projectiles, left permanently off. With it on, anything fired on the surface that was not behind a wall or stuck in tiles would drift sideways whenever it flew against the wind or moved slower than the air around it. The push was small per tick but continuous, enough to bend a slow shot noticeably over distance. It was never enabled in a released version, so nothing you fire today cares about the weather.