True volumetric clouds release 5
This is the contents and changelog post, go here for the download
Latest update on 03/01/2026: Updated documentation and multiple bugfixes, including reduced pixelation in motion and when looking at clouds through fog. The drive download link is the same but the contents have been updated, so if you received the download link via email or DM it will still work and contains the fixed version.
Highly improved clouds
A lot of work has gone into improving the clouds, previous releases have suffered from looking fairly flat, this version fixes that and provides more realistic and natural-looking cloud formations. The look of convective clouds is now better replicated and the clouds are much more interesting to fly around in.
Several improvements to the 3d noise, cloud shading, formations and layer rendering combine to produce these improvements.
Laythe volcanoes have also been redone to take advantage of these improvements
Anti-tiling has also been improved to reduce tiling/repetition artifacts (left: v4, right: new)
Wet surface effects
Wet surface effects have now been added, using Deferred. Whenever it rains, puddles will now slowly form, and when it is raining ripples can be seen on the puddle surfaces.
The puddles will accumulate locally and slowly dry off, this will be simulated in the background when you're away and works correctly in timewarp and when loading saved games (existing saves will work automatically).
The puddles/wet effect have settings to apply differently on terrain, buildings and parts.
Screen-space reflections
As you may have noticed with the wet surface effects, the reflections in the above screenshots are highly improved. This is thanks to screen-space reflections which are now available in Deferred. These reflections work with any parts/surfaces that are compatible with Deferred, including custom/PBR parts.
Images taken by Cornflame, you can find the full mod list here
Note that SSR won't work on OpenGL (Mac and Linux) due to limitations on the OpenGL version of KSP, Linux users can get around this by running the game with Proton.
The Scatterer ocean will now also use SSR whenever Deferred is installed, highly improving its look since ocean surfaces are mainly characterized by their reflective look. Note that the roughness of the reflections depends on how wavy the surface is.
The ocean also uses deferred rendering now, lifting previous performance limitations it had with secondary light sources.
Improved lighting and shadows
Cloud shadows are now correctly integrated with the lighting, building on the new Deferred version. Previous versions just overlaid the shadows on the image as a "darkening filter" over the whole image, which didn't integrate correctly with the lighting. This resulted in lighting looking strangely dark, while shadows were still visible.
See this comparison between release 4 and 5
Clouds also render in the built-in reflection probe now, allowing them to contribute to the ambient lighting, and helping everything look coherent. Overcast days look especially moody now.
Improved authoring tools
The cloud painter can now preview live what it's going to paint, which makes it easier to paint complex cloud formations.
The ability to paint using "tiles" has also been added, the idea is to author maps for specific cloud formations (eg a field of cumulus clouds, stratocumulus, storms etc) and then use those brushes to mix and match and paint large areas with realistic formations relatively easily, here are some examples out of the included tiles
Improved orbital view
Normalmap support has also been added to the 2d clouds, as well as the ability to generate 2d color and normalmaps from the volumetrics, helping the transition between the two look more seamless.
Other fixes and improvements
Atmosphere and cloud layers are now sorted correctly, fixing this issue which appeared on previous versions.
Updates since initial release
03/01/2026
Improved cloud upscaling:
Fix pixelation in motion when thin clouds/fog passes in front of thicker clouds, this was especially bad when very thin fog passes in front of farther away clouds and causes them to pixelate.
Fix smearing on overlapped cloud layers at long distances
Reduce trailing artifacts on clouds on fast camera movements
Add ability to set cloud layer linear speed relative to the planet's radius, or as angular speed instead of defaulting to linear speed at layer's altitude. Makes it easier to sync layers to each other and avoids them desyncing when rescaling the planet's radius (eg planet rescales that don't modify the cloud configs). Default to existing behaviour (linear at layer altitude) for compatibility
Fix singularities in cloud flowmaps causing visible discontinuities/artifacts on Jool
Improve Jool 2d (orbit view) flowmap
Fix puddles shifting/moving around in some cases
Improve ocean generation and scene switch times by generating ocean spectrum and variance on the GPU. Thanks to @Phantomical/steamroller for the tip and initial parallelized CPU version.
Small performance improvements in ocean FFT shader
Fix square artifacts on ocean surface on NVidia 50 series GPUs
Fix some case sensitive cloud texture paths for Linux. Thanks to @pipai for the tip
12/10/2025
Scatterer
Fix scatterer causing darker ground ambient/reflection in reflection probes
VR fixes by JonnyOthan
Fix duplicate instance message when switching scenes in editors
Deferred (download separately)
Fix nested reflections in reflection probe causing overbright reflections on minmus flats
30/09/2025
Fix Scatterer causing parts in the VAB to become dark.
Deferred fixes (download/update separately)
Fix Deferred SSR getting "phantom" bright white reflections on Minmus when there is nothing to reflect
Fix some issues with SSR becoming black
Force-enable reflection probes to fix some users getting no ambient lighting because they disabled it
29/09/2025:
Fixed a serious issue causing kraken attack when switching to map view.