I love snow and ice aesthetically, and so naturally I love snowy biomes in Minecraft, but it frustrates me how limited the actual snow currently is. Whenever snow falls in an area, it comes down in layers that pile on top of blocks and give them a nice, blanketed-in-snow look. However, snow currently doesn't land on anything except solid blocks. Trees and flat land all get covered, but anything else - stairs, slabs, fences, plants - gets completely ignored, and it results in an extremely patchy and unnatural look that detracts a lot from the overall appearance of snowy biomes. I'd love to see this get changed.
Whenever snow falls in an area, it should be able to land on blocks that have objects on top of them, whether they be flowers, fences, or whatever. The snow should also pile up on top of the objects, with snow gathering on fences/stairs/et cetera, and with sprites for flowers, crops, and other 2.5D entities changing to reflect the snow falling on them. Snow could even pile around glass panes, only appearing on the side of the glass that snow is falling next to in order to give the appearance of a snow-covered windowsill.
In addition, I'd like to suggest the following changes:
- First, allow ice to spread through adjacent water if snow is falling within a certain radius. This would make it so that rivers in and on the borders of snowy biomes would freeze over entirely, instead of having patches of unfrozen water in spots where the temperature was just high enough to prevent snow from falling on one or two blocks.
- Second, prevent torches and other light sources from causing snow and ice to melt as long as the ambient temperature is low enough for it to snow. Having a well-lit area is vital in Minecraft, and it's frustrating to illuminate a snowy village only to have to go back through moments later and adjust all of the lights so that they're as far away from the snow as possible to avoid melting. Obvious heat sources like fire or lava could cause snow to melt regardless of ambient temperature, but torches and glowstone and lamps should provide lighting and nothing else.
- Third, perhaps along with snow being able to fall and pile up on flowers and other plants, plants that aren't cut out for the cold could wither and die when the snow falls on them. To counteract this, a handful of new flowers and crops could be introduced that generate naturally in snowy biomes and don't wither in the cold. This would help to add more unique flavor to the standard snowy plains/hills/forest biomes that otherwise tend to feel like exact replicas of other biomes just placed under a layer of snow.
With the Aquatic Update soon to bring improved water physics and allow water to flow through fences, half-slabs, and other non-solid blocks, it would be wonderful to see snow physics adjusted to follow the same rules in a future update, and it would be especially wonderful to see snowy environments made more nuanced and appealing in general. Maybe a future update could be centered around making extreme environments (e.g. snowy and desert areas) more interesting and adding more unique elements to them?
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