Wetness
Wetness is a measure of the humidity of your clothing. I don't mean your green leather armor, but your clothing displayed on your skin, Steve!
Wetness is measured in %, just as humidity is. It ranges from 0% to 100%.
Yeah, obviously. Your clothing will soak up the wetness from rainwater, hence increasing your wetness by 0.01% per tick, or 0.2% per second. It's not much, but it matters anyways.
Naturally, when you are in a body of water, your wetness rises. It depends how deep you are in the water. If your're only half-way in the water, your wetness rises by 1.25% per tick (25% per second) up to 40%. You are unable to soak up more water without going deeper in the water. When you are fully submerged in water, your wetness rises at alarming rate of 5% per tick (100% per second). This means that being only a second fully submerged in a 2 blocks deep water puddle can ramp up your wetness under 1 second!
This can be especially dangerous during winter if body heat is enabled. See the heat exchange paragraph under consequences section.
You can't be drenched in water forever, of course! As the water evaporates, your wetness gradualy decreases. The rate at which the water evaporates is roughly 0.005% per tick (0.1% per second). This rate doubles when you are standing in direct sunlight.
The natural drain rate and the multiplier sunlight gives can be configured under Wetness caterogry in config.
Towels are a very versatile item to get rid of wetness more quickly. But for some of you, the towel may not work the way you expect. During the development of the towel, I was holding on the idea that you can't dry yourself with a wet towel. This led to the not-so-minecrafty way towels work.
Basically, towels try to equalize your wetness and their wetness. This is done very simply. Take your wetness, add it to the wetness of the towel, divide it by 2 and you are good to go! Well, most of the times. The towels have a capacity. By defaults, towels can accept up to 40% of the player's wetness. So if you're totally drenched in water (100% wetness), and you use a towel, your wetness stops at 60% while the towel will have 100% wetness (well, 100% of the 40% of yours max, i.e. 40% of your max). This is done by a rather simple check that checks if the wetness to be accepted by the towel exceeds the wetness the towel can store. If it does, it takes the difference between the to-be-accepted amount and the maximum capacity. Then, it subtracts the aforementioned difference from the towel's to-be-accepted portion of the wetness and adds it to the player's.
The part that confuses players most is that when you have for example 10% of wetness left, your towel can accept it's whole portion. That leaves both you and the towel with 5% of wetness after use, which corelates to incersely logarithmic behaviour. So you can drain neither yourself or the towel completely this way, since both sides can lend 1/2 of their wetness at most.
The optimal way to drain towels, however, is to drop them atop your furnace. Of course, the furnace needs to be lit in order for the towels to dry. The towels emmit steam as the wetness evaporates, which can be clearly seen by the white clouds and heard by the characteristic sound.
This is how it looks in reality:
Also, standing by the furnace while it's working isn't such a bad idea. While it emmits heat that may be unbearable under certain circumstances (such as in desert biomes), standing near heat source will cause your wetness to decrease rapidly.
Here are some blocks that can be used for drying nearby
| Block | Wetness Modifier |
|---|---|
| Fire | -0.5% |
| Lava | -1% |
| Flowing Lava | -1% |
| Lit Furnace | -0.4% |
| Magma | -0.4% |
Info for modders: You can add your own blocks using map at
WetnessModifier.humiditymap. Judging by the name, you can also add blocks that increase your wetness when nearby!
Water is heavy, right? Around ~1000kg/m3, 'member? Damn, you should have listened on those science classes. Anyways, water is by all means very heavy. Walking fully drenched in water can be very exhausting. As such, when your wetness rises beyond 75%, you get slowed down.
The slowdown is calculated in two stages. Stage 1 is a stage that is done by Survival Inc. and uses this equation:
Where:
- x is the current level of wetness (in %)
- g is the so-called "correction", i.e. the minimal walking speed multiplier
- t is the wetness slowdown threshold (in %), or above which value a slowdown is applied
- m is the maximum wetness value (in %) -> it is always 100%. This variable is there just in case units change in future.
- y is the resultant value, passed along to stage 2 as r
After that, the stage 2 is run. Stage 2 is calculated by minecraft engine, and it can't be changed (easily). State 2 uses this equation:
Where:
- x is the original walking speed
- y is the resultant walking speed
- r is the value returned by stage 1
This is why values from stage 1 always return negative values.
So, in conclusion, your walking speed decreases the further your wetness is beyond the slowdown threshold, up to the minimum walking speed, which is by default 1/4 of the original speed. The minimum walking speed and the wetness slowdown threshold can be configured using the mod config under Wetness category.
To summarize, having 100% wetness doubles your heat exchange rate. That means that being fully drenched in water when wearing leather armor reduces it's effectivity by 50%. On the other hand, wearing full diamond armor and having wetness at 100% can lead to up to 450% heat exchange rate. This can prove painfully lethal in some situations, as you will either freeze to death or burn to death. Your choice.