Saturn Water | Ocean & Water Addon for Godot

What is this?

This is a Godot 4 water addon that gives you moving water for anything from a small pool to a full ocean horizon. It combines FFT waves, depth-based color, refraction and foam, plus tools for drawing and shaping water volumes right in the editor.

I built it so you can skip the painful part of getting water to look right. Tear it apart, push the values until something breaks, then pull it back. That's the whole point.

Start with Free for finite water volumes and the shared scripting API. Go Pro if you want terrain-driven shores, distant oceans and advanced underwater lighting.

Waves you can shape

You can tweak wave height, wind direction, wind speed, swell and choppiness. Crest sharpness narrows the peaks and broadens the troughs, and the wave domain controls the size of the repeating patch. Uniform current moves the whole pattern across the surface.

Water settings are editable resources, so you can share one look across several bodies of water or make each one totally different.

Free vs Pro

No watermark, no limit on how many water bodies you can have, and no activation service in either edition.

What Pro adds

Terrain-driven shores. Capture your static scene geometry or give it a seabed heightmap. A shallow-water solver then adds shoaling, swash and shoreline foam around the terrain.

Ocean horizons. Extend the detailed water patch with a distant skirt that shares its lighting and wave phase, then gradually flattens out toward the horizon.

Underwater lighting. Tune caustics, light shafts, suspended-water haze and distance blur. You can even let exterior light shafts come in through the volume's side walls.

Built for your own gameplay

You can sample surface position, normal, depth and uniform current through the same API in both editions. Use it for swimming logic, visual markers or your own buoyancy system. The wave rendering and the surface queries use the same wave field, so they always match.

The addon includes the GDScript and shader source. Built-in buoyancy, wakes, splashes and flow painting are not included.

Installation

1. Download Free or Pro and extract the ZIP.
2. Copy addons/saturn_water into your Godot project.
3. Use the Forward+ renderer and enable Saturn Water under Project Settings > Plugins.
4. Add a WaterBody3D to a scene with a camera, environment and directional light, or draw a volume using the Water dock.
5. Tweak everything in the Inspector.

I'm developing this on Godot 4.8.dev6. I haven't verified other versions, or the Mobile and Compatibility renderers.

What's in the download?

The addon source, an installation guide, a settings reference and developer documentation. Example scenes, demo environments and scene textures are not included.

To upgrade, close Godot and replace the entire Free addon folder with the Pro folder. Keep your own scenes and settings outside the addon folder. Both editions use the same node classes and resource paths, so nothing breaks.

Current limitations

• Waves are height fields, so they can't curl over, form tubes or collide with themselves.
• Shorelines use a finite grid and one seabed height per column. Caves and stacked surfaces need special care.
• The ocean horizon is only a visual extension. The underwater volume and shoreline simulation stay finite.
• Refraction depends on screen color and depth, so off-screen objects and transparent geometry can show artifacts.
• Foam can look patchy. Grazing waterline views, submerged highlights and light shafts can show seams or banding.
• Big water volumes and close underwater views can get expensive. Profile your scene on the hardware you plan to support.
• Fog doesn't work with the addon, that's a fix we are going to focus on the next update.
• Too much foam? sometimes foam goes bunkers, that also needs a fix

License

Saturn Water is CC0. You don't need to credit me, and you can use and modify it in personal or commercial projects.

Why am I selling this?

I'm a developer from Brazil, and the money from these packs is what lets me keep making them. It goes toward software licenses, tools, and eventually funding the game I'm building toward. If this saves you time or helps you land the look you were after, that means a lot to me.