Climate mode in Universe Sandbox is very buggy. I does not work properly. The climate mode is buggy for Earth, custom made planets, and worst of all, for Mars. My suggestion is for developers to improve climate mode by adding more visuals features and to get rid of all bugs. The most annoying bugs occur when the climate's temperature changes, either up or down and does not correspond to temperature changes and simulation speeds. The climate mode animation does not work correctly. Mostly the retreating and expansion of ice for ice caps suddenly appears or disappears. Also when planets becomes very hot (between 50 to 100 degrees), climate mode should show heat on the ground by showing an orange to red glow, representing heat.
I have noticed that the climate mode animations are also repetitive for different simulation scenarios and different custom objects. That is not correct because the physical shape of ice would be always different from year to year after expanding and retreat of ice caps. That problem is also because of the lack of surface textures and quality of graphics.
For the Earth climate mode, NASA uses an infra-red filter which is capable of showing accurate thermal localized temperatures, displaying different temperature levels throughout the Earth's globe. In Universe Sandbox, climate mode would need an extra option which would show localized infra-red temperatures for Earth and all other custom user made planets that have climate mode enabled.
Planet grids are soon coming out for Universe Sandbox, but that is not enough for the improvement of climate mode. First of all, developers must find and track down all bugs relating to the animation effects and temperature of climate mode. Then, an infra-red thermal system feature model must be added in place to show localized temperatures when climate mode is switched on.
However fast or slow any simulations run, climate mode must be made suitable for various time steps of simulation speeds to avoid glitches. Also, I have noticed when making super Earth sized planets, climate mode does not work at all for planet which are supersized and have massive atmospheres. For tiny planets with very low or no atmospheres, the climate mode system does not show up at all.
Please improve climate mode by fixing all bugs and glitches and also add more features relating to climate mode. An infra-red thermal localized temperature model system must be added to climate mode. Also, the water freezing bug interferes with climate mode, so please fix that annoying frozen glitch that everybody, including me, is complaining about.
I hope that the planet grids system will open up the door to new and improved possibilities that will expand what climate mode can do and how it would behave. Water vapour is yet another cool feature that needs to be added to climate mode, as well as rain, falling snow and fog. Different weather patterns and winds such as breeze, drizzle, tornadoes and hurricanes are superb visual features that must be added to climate mode too. All wind types and patterns must be fully animated with climate mode.