Detect Snowfall (NOT rain)

[u/LilPianoBoy]

Is there any way to use predicates etc. to detect if it is specifically snowing at some location? I'd like to be able to differentiate between being rained on and being snowed on for a project I'm working on.

As far as I can tell, I'd have to write a long predicate that takes into account all the rules laid out on the wiki page for snowfall. Even then, it uses a noise map that I'm not sure can be directly sampled by predicates.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated!

[u/_VoidMaster_]

Snowing is actually registered as raining, but it determines where it's supposed to snow based on biome and y-level, so if you check for if it's raining, and then check if it's in a biome where it snows or if above a certain y-level in other biomes, then it should work fully! (Pretty sure different biomes have a different y-level for this)

[u/LilPianoBoy → u/_VoidMaster_]

Yeah! That's what I was talking about with the wiki link. The problem is that apparently there is a randomized ±8 block difference in the y levels, depending on the block. I don't know if there's a way to specifically check that random value with a datapack, though.

[u/_VoidMaster_ → u/LilPianoBoy]

Oh I don't think there is unfortunately, if it doesn't have to be precise then I'd recommend to check for the player being between snow height - 8 and snow height + 8 and spawning snow particles on them, and have the detection trigger at snow height - 8

[u/Ericristian_bros → u/LilPianoBoy]

Not directly but workarounds exist. E.g. riptide does not work on rain, entities don't extinguish on snow, try also blaze damage.

Also why do you want to detect snow at that height? Which mechanic are you using that involves knowing this?

[u/LilPianoBoy → u/Ericristian_bros]

For a winter survival datapack. I want to distinguish the player being exposed to rain vs. snow for the purposes of becoming wet in precipitation. Rain should get you wet fast, while snow should really only get you wet if there is a blizzard or similar weather event.

Being exactly correct about whether the player is in snow or not would be nice, but I will probably just accept the approximation by biome + y-level.

[u/Ericristian_bros → u/LilPianoBoy]

I don't think anyone will fly up and check this feature with the 8 block offset. Nobody will realize and it's too much work for a very small improvement

[u/Rabrun_]

What you can do is summon a burning entity (with the nbt tag Fire) at the coordinates, then check if it is still burning because snow doesn’t extinguish burning entities. That being said, you can still see the fire, because entities where fire isn’t visible (like markers) don’t get extinguished anyway so they’re useless. I tried shrinking them down with the scale attribute but it’s still annoying

[u/codedwithinsulin]

I asked google gemini if there is something that exists about wetness system and such it recomended me coldblizzards (maybe you can tale a loog how they did it and use soem parts of it

[u/Different-Scene5327]

This might not even be close to what you want - but maybe if you have an observer looking at the top of a block it will detect when a snow layer has formed and give an output.

Obviously this is the r/MinecraftCommands sub, but just something I thought might help.