We carry out a thorough study of weight-shifting operators on Hilbert modular forms in characteristic p, generalising the author’s prior work with Sasaki to the case where p is ramified in the totally real field. In particular, we use the partial Hasse invariants and Kodaira–Spencer filtrations defined by Reduzzi and Xiao to improve on Andreatta and Goren’s construction of partial $\Theta $ -operators, obtaining ones whose effect on weights is optimal from the point of view of geometric Serre weight conjectures. Furthermore, we describe the kernels of partial $\Theta $ -operators in terms of images of geometrically constructed partial Frobenius operators. Finally, we apply our results to prove a partial positivity result for minimal weights of mod p Hilbert modular forms.