I’m a terrible world hoarder, and I like realistic climates. For instance, I like no snow on tropical islands, but I also like proper seasonality (because there are seasons even in the tropics), so I don’t want to just turn off all seasons but summer, which just makes for boring weather.
The solution? The NRaas Tempest mod. This mod allows you to dictate the climate and weather patterns in each season in any given world on a detailed level. As I’ve been playing TS3, I’ve made and saved quite a few presets for Tempest. Recently, I decided to go through and fine-tune all of them because I’ve learned how to use the mod better over time. Since I’m doing that, I thought I’d go ahead and share them as I go, in case others might like to use them, too. This is just the “boilerplate” post for this sharing project, so that I don’t have to repeat myself on future posts of the individual presets. The presets themselves will be shared in separate posts.
Each of the presets I’ve made is based on actual average climate data from a real-world city/region. Yes, I did actual research. So, as just one example, you can have a Twinbrook with New Orleans’s climate. In fact, there’ll be lots of options because I’ve made a ton of these presets. Each post for them will be tagged “tempest project” in case you’d like to track that to keep tabs on when I share new ones. Here’s a link to the tag page, if you want to see the presets I’ve posted so far.
The presets are extremely easy to use because I’ve done all the research and work for you. All you’ll need to do is plop them into your Library folder and then import them into your worlds. There is more detailed install and use instructions behind the cut, as well as a few more general notes.
Required to use these presets:
Also obviously, you need to have Seasons installed.
Not so obviously, you need NRaas Overwatch, which you must use to import these settings into Tempest, since Tempest doesn’t have its own import function. But everyone ought to have Overwatch, anyway, for smoother gameplay.
NRaas Traveler, to unlock weather in the EA vacation worlds, if you travel to them.
Danjaley’s Fireplace Tuning, which reduces or eliminates the possibility of fireplaces starting fires, depending on which version you pick. This is useful because many of these settings feature auto-lighting fireplaces on active lots when the temperature gets below a certain point. I recommend the “no fire” version, personally.
Gurra’s Seasonal Sunrise/Sunset Offset Mod, which allows you to adjust sunrise and sunset times by season. It’s great if you play worlds meant to be set in more extreme latitudes, like Scandinavia or a polar region, where you have much longer days/nights at certain times of the year. There are two settings included in the download, but there are also instructions for making your own setting. The mod will apply globally to all saves in user folder, though, so it’s best if you use it in a specialized user folder and if you don’t travel to other worlds that would have different patterns.
Longer Seasons, which will make it so that you can have longer seasons than the unmodded game’s 28 days each, with options for different transition lengths between them. However, this mod edits the same XML as Gurra’s mod above, so they will conflict if you use them together as-is. That said, if you want the features of both in a save and you have s3pe and aren’t afraid to use it, you can use the two mods as a reference to make your own custom mod. I have made several of my own, for different climates/latitudes, in this way. If anyone would be interested in them, let me know!
