Getting Smoke Showcase Project Working In New World
New World has always had a basic particle system for visual effects, but players and modders wanted more control over atmospheric elements like smoke, fog, and embers. The Smoke Showcase Project is essentially a community-driven set of plugins and config files that let you layer realistic volumetric smoke effects into the game engine. It works by injecting custom particle shaders and modifying the existing effect pipeline through DLL injection, which means you need to match the game's version exactly or you'll get crashes. I spent about three weeks getting this stable enough to run without the game freezing every twenty minutes. The initial install is straightforward enough. You grab the latest release from the GitHub repo, extract it to your New World root directory, and run the installer script. It patches the relevant binaries and drops a config folder into your userdata. The problem most people hit is that the injector conflicts with Easy Anti-Cheat if you don't configure it right. You need to add an exception for the injector process before launching, and you have to do it through the EAC whitelist file, not just Windows firewall settings. I missed that step twice and ended up with a temp ban both times. Third time was the charm after I read the actual documentation instead of skimming it. Once the injection works, you edit the YAML config files in the showcase folder. Each effect has its own file, and the parameters map directly to particle count, velocity curves, lifetime, alpha fade, and drift vectors. The documentation covers the basics but skips the stuff that actually matters for making it look right. For example, the base smoke shader in New World uses a pre-baked alpha texture that doesn't blend well with outdoor lighting. If you leave it on default, your smoke looks like a flat gray sticker floating over the world. I found that overriding the lighting model to use diffuse-only mode with a custom opacity curve made it blend properly. The trick is setting the roughness value to 0.85 and the specular to zero in the effect config. That single change took me from "obviously fake" to "actually passable."
Another thing nobody mentions is thermal updraft simulation. Real smoke rises differently depending on ambient temperature and wind. New World's engine has a hidden wind variable you can hook into through the API. Without using it, all your smoke plumes drift in one direction at a constant speed and it looks wrong immediately. I wrote a small Lua script that reads the current server wind value and passes it to each particle emitter's drift vector. It adds maybe five percent overhead to the effect system but makes a noticeable difference when you're standing near a campfire in a steady breeze. Without it, the smoke just ignores the wind entirely and floats lazily anyway. Performance is where this project breaks down for a lot of people. Each active smoke emitter costs roughly two to three milliseconds of GPU time on a mid-range card. Run eight to ten concurrent effects and you start losing frames, especially in crowded areas like Great Cragstead or Brackenwood during events. I had to cut my effect count in half and disable the ember particles entirely on my RTX 3060. If you're running older hardware or a lower-end CPU, you might need to drop to three or four simultaneous emitters max. The project docs suggest targeting 60fps as a minimum, but I'd recommend capping at 45fps if you want consistent performance during raids or PvP. Frame spikes are worse than a lower baseline because they break immersion anyway. There's also the issue of effect stacking. When two smoke sources are close together, the alpha blending goes haywire and you get dark patches or outright black holes in the particle field. I solved this by setting a minimum distance threshold in the config where overlapping emitters disable their alpha blending and switch to additive mode instead. It's not perfect but it prevents the worst artifacts. A proper solution would require shader-level changes that go beyond what the project supports without custom recompilation.
If you just want something that works out of the box without tweaking configs, the project does offer preset packs for common scenarios like campfires, volcanic vents, and ghostly fog banks. These run reasonably well on most systems but they're generic and won't look great if you've spent time customizing your graphics settings. The real value is in the config system itself, which lets you dial in effects to match your specific hardware and play style. I'd recommend starting with a preset, getting it running, then slowly adjusting parameters one at a time so you actually know what each slider does. I tried changing three values simultaneously on my first real edit session and spent two hours figuring out which one broke the effect. The project hasn't been updated in several months and there's no guarantee it'll work with future patches. Amazon occasionally changes the effect pipeline between versions and the injector can break without warning. My workaround has been to keep a backup of the last working version and roll back immediately when a patch hits. I check the project's Discord daily for version compatibility notes and avoid updating the game until someone confirms the injectors are still functional. It adds friction but it's the only way to avoid spending a weekend troubleshooting broken injections. For people who want a simpler alternative without the injection complexity, the official New World modding tools include a limited smoke effect system through the standard addon API. It's far less capable but it won't get you banned and it works across all patches. If you're casual about it and just want occasional atmospheric effects, the built-in system might be worth the limitation. The Smoke Showcase Project is for people who want the effects to look right even if it means maintaining a more fragile setup.
Get the Full Details
You can find the project at its GitHub repository under the Smoke Showcase Project name. The README has installation instructions and the config reference is pretty thorough once you get past the initial confusion. Don't skip the troubleshooting section even if you think you won't need it. I wish I had read it before my second EAC ban.
