Dynamic Surroundings Rebirth

Dynamic Surroundings Rebirth brings the classic Dynamic Surroundings experience to modern Minecraft, rebuilt for Forge & NeoForge. A port by uawyiegrfv of the beloved Dynamic Surroundings by OreCruncher.

No server-side mod required — you can add this to your pack and play on public servers. Note that without server support, a few features don't apply: other players' footprints, damage-number sync and village ambience are not available in this port. It is otherwise fully client-side.

What is this?

A faithful port of Dynamic Surroundings (original mod by OreCruncher) to modern Minecraft on Forge & NeoForge. It restores most of the original 1.12.2-era experience and adds new content of its own — a modern remake of the classic ambient/atmosphere mod.

Compared to the original, this port:

• Reworked for modern Minecraft — rebuilt on the modern modding stack (Forge & NeoForge).
• Restores the majority of the 1.12.2 feature set — the ambience you remember, back on a modern version.
• Adds new content — including exclusive Deep Dark ambience, a rewritten shader-driven aurora, leaf-wind gusts, leaf-litter footsteps, treasure-distance readouts, quick volume control and more.

Features

• Biome ambience — forests, plains, jungles, oceans and more, with smooth transitions as you explore. Works with biome mods like Biomes O' Plenty and Terralith via convention tags.
• Material footsteps — surface-specific step sounds for every material, including jump, landing and walk-through-brush sounds.
• Player condition sounds — heartbeat when low on health, hunger rumbles, jump and landing sounds, crafting, bow/shield/crossbow and hotbar switching.
• Footprints — leave prints in sand, snow, mud and more, in several styles.
• Underwater acoustics — sounds crossing water are muffled and quieter; diving dampens what you hear.
• Weather ambience — desert sandstorms and Nether dust rain, plus distant background thunder in storms.
• Aurora — the northern lights appear over cold biomes around midnight, rendered as a shader-driven curtain with vertical ray structure and vivid spectrum colours.
• Fog — morning, biome, weather, bedrock and elevation fog.
• Enhanced sound — reverb and occlusion in a background thread; sounds stay audible behind walls and large obstacles.
• Magma sizzle & hot blocks — rain hisses on lava, steam rises from hot blocks, and fire/bubbles emanate from lava sources.
• Season support — with Serene Seasons installed, the clock shows the real season, morning fog becomes seasonal, and frost breath follows seasonal temperature.
• Particles — fireflies, frost breath, water ripples, footprints and more.
• Crit words & damage numbers, background thunder, waterfall effects, falling-block dust and held-torch crackle.
• Deep Dark ambience — a low drone, a faint persistent heartbeat and intermittent Sculk clicks.
• Leaf-wind gusts — intermittent leaf rustling in wooded biomes, more frequent at night.
• Leaf-litter footsteps — several landing crunch and walking step variants.
• Treasure distance — the horizontal distance to the target is shown on explorer maps.
• Sound-options sliders — Footsteps and Biomes volume in the vanilla Sound Options menu (0% restores vanilla footstep sounds).
• Quick sound volume — hold Ctrl+backtick to adjust recently played sounds on the fly.
• Compass & clock HUD — shown while holding the corresponding item.
• Individual sound configuration — fine-tune every sound from a config screen.

Requirements

• Forge or NeoForge — pick the build matching your Minecraft version (see the Files tab).
• Cloth Config API
• Architectury API (NeoForge builds only)

License & Credits

MIT License. Ported by uawyiegrfv, based on the original Dynamic Surroundings by OreCruncher. Audio assets are CC0; full credits in the repository's CREDITS.md.

AI Disclosure: This port is developed with assistance from AI tools (Claude Code). AI-assisted code is provided "as is" and may contain bugs; please report issues on the GitHub tracker and use at your own risk.