Lightning Devastation Help!

[Jackal Black]

Hey everyone, but I really need help with lightning damage.

First of all, the world is about 18 hours old and when I created it I enabled lightning damage during world setup.

Basically what happened was that after 3 long days of thunderstorms a considerable portion of a forest was wiped out by lightning, the real problem is the myriad of foliage blocks left floating as you can see from the screenshots.

I thought about getting creative and deleting every single block, but there are just too many, and it's definitely not a solution to do every time a thunderstorm appears in the game.

Does anyone know a way to delete all the floating blocks or regenerate the devastated portion?

Really, I don't want to start the world again

[Zane Mordien]

Sorry but I think you have to do it manually. Reminds me why I keep that setting turned off. I burn down a lot of forests and that is the worst looking one I've seen.

[Jackal Black]

4 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

Sorry but I think you have to do it manually. Reminds me why I keep that setting turned off. I burn down a lot of forests and that is the worst looking one I've seen.

Hi, thank you very much for the answer

I see it as very long to delete all those blocks by hand, at least know the command to disable that function, I'm looking for it in the wiki but I can't find it.

[Zane Mordien]

2 hours ago, Jackal Black said:

Hi, thank you very much for the answer

I see it as very long to delete all those blocks by hand, at least know the command to disable that function, I'm looking for it in the wiki but I can't find it.

Oh, if that isn't near your home and you just want to quickly fix the problem. You can just regenerate the terrain and it will go back to a forest.

 

/wgen regen 1 

1= the chunk radius around you to regenerate. I start with a small number because it can get out of hand and slow down your computer if you try to do a large radius. Be careful with this command because it NUKES everything and resets it back to default world generation. It will nuke anything you have built and any animals.

Edited May 5, 2025 by Zane Mordien

[Zane Mordien]

Also 

/wc lightningfires off

 

That turns off lightning causing fires. It is a newer setting so not in the wiki yet. If it's not off then try False. I just did it but already forgot which command.

[Jackal Black]

4 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

Anche 

/wc fulmini spenti

 

Disattiva i fulmini che causano incendi. È un'impostazione più recente, quindi non è ancora presente nel wiki. Se non è disattivata, prova False. L'ho appena fatto, ma ho già dimenticato quale comando.

thank you, you are my savior, I tried to look for that command to turn off the lightning fire but I couldn't find it. You were really helpful both for this advice and for being able to regenerate the portion of land.

Thank you so much

[V1ncent]

A side question: I have always been wondering why only the forest fire can do such a mirracle as only the upmost leaves survive without support, while you manually cut leaves/woods and the unsupported leaves just despawn themselves. Isn't the fire dustruction not a block-based mechanism?

Edited May 6, 2025 by V1ncent

[Jackal Black]

5 hours ago, V1ncent said:

Una domanda a parte: mi sono sempre chiesto perché solo l'incendio boschivo possa fare un tale miracolo, dato che solo le foglie più alte sopravvivono senza supporto, mentre tagliando manualmente foglie/boschi le foglie senza supporto spariscono da sole. La distruzione causata dall'incendio non è forse un meccanismo basato sui blocchi?

Interesting question, in fact I reported it as a bug, as I also reported that (at least in the Italian version of the game) it is specified that lightning will set fire only to dried vegetation, I knew that enabling that function could cause some problems, but this way perhaps it is out of scale for the purpose of gameplay, considering that in some parts of the world you have a storm literally every 2 days and you risk not only aesthetic damage but also damage to gameplay as you would find yourself without woods within a radius of hundreds of blocks if not even thousands. in fact I specified that mine was a new world, I don't dare to imagine with that function active what would happen to a world with 300 or 800 hours of life...
However I believe that the issue of the leaves you mentioned is the same problem as the snow, where the snow or ice does not disappear even though it is now 30 or 40 degrees and spring is almost over. Simply the game engine does not correctly update the state of the map on the areas far from the player. For example, I see this forest that I posted on the Horizon from my house.
But maybe I'm wrong about this

[dakko]

11 hours ago, Jackal Black said:

...it is specified that lightning will set fire only to dried vegetation...

I do not think there is any truly dry vegetation in the game (well, maybe dead acacia trees and some mature crops). Perhaps it really means that fires will not start when it is raining.

[Zippy Wonderdust]

Meesa no understandin' dis...

Lightning happens during storms.  Storms include rain.  Rain puts out fires.

(It always puts out my torches and campfires, and I'm pretty sure grass fires from kilns won't spread when it is raining.)

So how are entire forests burning down? Is this some weird edge case where lightning strikes just as a storm ends?

[Maelstrom]

Sometimes there's lightning but no rain, which is pretty realistic for the area I live IRL.

[Zippy Wonderdust]

Upon further thought, I remember that any block that has a block anywhere above it is considered to be sheltered from rain.  This means that if a tree catches fire somewhere near the bottom the fire will quite happily spread because it is being sheltered by the rest of the tree above it!  This also possibly explains all of the hovering foliage in the screenshot; perhaps the rest of the tree burned out beneath that foliage but it was preserved because, being the topmost block, it was actually exposed to the rain and unable to catch fire.

Edited May 11, 2025 by Zippy Wonderdust

[Decabyte]

The mod Pyrogenesis is trying to make this not so much of an issue.
https://mods.vintagestory.at/pyrogenesis

Edited June 2, 2025 by Decabyte

[AppleJam]

On 5/6/2025 at 12:31 PM, V1ncent said:

A side question: I have always been wondering why only the forest fire can do such a mirracle as only the upmost leaves survive without support, while you manually cut leaves/woods and the unsupported leaves just despawn themselves. Isn't the fire dustruction not a block-based mechanism?

To be fair, if the tree is tall enough even cutting them down/shaving the leaves seem to leave a block floating sometimes too and I've seen it happen a few times with redwood trees, the snow piles stacking on top of branch blocks were especially egregious too, happening on top of slightly taller oak trees, often hanging around even if all leaves were gone.