How do I stop the rain on my Minecraft server?

Rain in Minecraft is mostly a matter of atmosphere, but on a server it also means darker screens, thunderstorms that spawn hostile mobs during the day and lightning that can set houses on fire. As an operator you can stop the rain immediately, set a duration, or turn the weather off altogether with a gamerule.

Stopping the rain right away

1. Go to the game panel and click your server.
2. Open the Console tab.
3. Type weather clear and press Enter.

In-game, operators use /weather clear. Without a duration the clear weather lasts a random time (five minutes to a few hours). With a number you set the duration in seconds: weather clear 100000 gives you almost 28 hours of sunshine. The other options are weather rain and weather thunder, handy for events or for charging creepers.

Turning the weather off permanently

To make sure it never rains again, first clear the weather and then stop the weather cycle:

weather clear followed by gamerule doWeatherCycle false

From now on the weather stays as it is. It is a gamerule, so it is stored in the world and survives restarts. Turn it back on with gamerule doWeatherCycle true. Freezing the time as well? See making it day or night.

Why thunderstorms deserve attention

• During a thunderstorm the light level drops so far that hostile mobs spawn outside during the day.
• Lightning ignites blocks and can set a wooden build on fire if fire spread is enabled.
• Lightning turns creepers into charged creepers, villagers into witches and pigs into zombified piglins.
• Skeleton horses ("skeleton traps") only spawn during thunderstorms.

On a building server you therefore want doWeatherCycle false; on a survival server, rain is often left on but fire spread is turned off.

Rain per world

Weather is stored per world. With Multiverse you can permanently disable the weather in one world with /mv modify set weather false, while it keeps raining in another. On Paper you can also set this per world in the world's configuration.

Sleeping and the weather

When players sleep through the night (or when one player is enough because of playersSleepingPercentage), a thunderstorm ends as well. On servers where sleeping is easy, storms are rarely an issue.

Related settings

• doDaylightCycle to freeze the time.
• doFireTick against fire spreading after a lightning strike.
• Client-side: players can lower particles in their own video settings if rain drops their FPS; that has nothing to do with the server.

Stuck, for example because a plugin keeps switching the weather back on? Open a ticket and mention which plugins you run.