Lumenite Shaders

Lumenite 2.9.1
Everything new since 2.8.4.
Clouds, rebuilt
New cloud style: Volumetric (realistic). It is the new default and is used in every preset. The previous realistic clouds are still there, unchanged, as Volumetric (classic).
Clouds that look like clouds. The new style is built from scratch. The rows of same-size puffy balls with fluffy loose ends are gone. Now:
Clouds come in every size, from big towers to small scraps. They crowd together in places and leave wide stretches of open sky in others, and sometimes line up in rows along the wind.
Each one has a flat grey base and a crisp, sunlit cauliflower top built of lobes on lobes, leaning downwind.
Edges only fray into torn wisps where a cloud is dying, and along the base when it rains.
Sunlight, done properly.
Sunlit faces are bright and shaded sides are grey, with real contrast between them. The skylight on the clouds used to be as bright as the sky itself, which washed out every shadow.
Clouds in front of the sun stand dark, with brilliant silver rims, instead of glowing white all over.
With the sun behind you, sunlit faces are at their brightest.
At golden hour, sunlit faces turn warm cream and gold over mauve shadows.
At sunset, the tops burn gold and rose over bases already in shadow. Higher clouds catch the light longest, so the altocumulus glow pink after the cumulus below have dimmed.
When the sun is low, clouds cast shadows on each other.
Clouds at different heights and sizes. Cloud bases are no longer one flat plane across the sky.
Bases are lower where the air is moister and higher on older, dying and spreading clouds, and they differ a little from cloud to cloud. From a hilltop you can see clouds at several levels at once.
Bases climb through the day as the ground heats up, and sink again at night.
Sizes vary: small, close-packed clouds in the morning, bigger and further apart by the afternoon, and some areas build big cloud masses while others stay a scatter of small ones.
Most clouds stay shallow and a few tower far above the rest.
The mid-level clouds sit at a different height every day, and rise and dip across the sky.
Clouds can now grow taller: the cloud layer reaches higher than before.
Clouds live and die. They form, grow and fade away while you watch, and a dying cloud frays apart.
The second cloud deck is now the mid-level sky. It used to be the same clouds again, higher up. Now it is altocumulus, rows of small rounded cloudlets, or a smooth grey altostratus veil the sun shows through as a pale disc. It drifts faster than the clouds below, and in a different direction.
Cirrus no longer draws thin bright arcs and rings across the sky. Its strands run along the wind.
Cirrocumulus is a soft rippled sheet instead of a field of hard white dots.
No more bright column in the clouds opposite a low sun.
Clouds no longer jump once an hour, when the game's timer wraps around.
Dynamic weather
The sky follows the day.
Mornings start clear, or under a grey layer that breaks up by noon.
Small flat cumulus appear mid-morning and grow through the afternoon. On unstable days they tower.
In the evening they flatten, spread out and fade, and they are gone by night.
Every day is different. Dry, clear days; days of fair-weather cumulus; grey mornings; days when altocumulus and cirrus stream over. The weather drifts gradually over a day or two, and everyone on a server gets the same weather.
The climate matters. Deserts get a few small, high, ragged clouds. Jungles and swamps are humid, with low bases and big afternoon towers. Cold biomes lean to flat grey layers.
Rain rolls in. When it starts to rain, the rain clouds sweep across the sky from upwind, with ragged scud racing underneath. When it stops, the sky clears from the same side and leaves crisp clouds behind, often lined up in rows.
Thunderstorms build towering storm clouds that spread into anvils at the top.
New Dynamic Weather setting, on by default. Off keeps one fair-weather sky, always. It works with the Volumetric (realistic) clouds.
Fixes
The pack loads again. It failed to load with "failed to resolve #include directive" (since 2.8.3).
Defaults and presets
Torch Flicker is on by default and in every preset. It was off by default, and off in Potato, Barebones Optimized, Signature and Signature Barebones.
Performance
The new clouds cost about the same as the old ones. The weather map behind them is a little cheaper to build, and the mid-level deck is thinner, so it takes fewer steps.
The download is 2 MB bigger, for the new cloud shape texture.

Lumenite 2.8.4


Fixes
No more sudden lighting switch at dusk. Just before night, the shadows and lighting used to jump to the other side of the sky in one frame. For a while after that, the moon lit the world in sunset red. Now sunlight fades out as the sun sets and moonlight fades in as the moon rises, so the moment the shadows swap from the sun to the moon is invisible.
Lightning rods and chains: no more dark, flickering block of shadow on the wall behind lightning rods and the new iron and copper chains. The coloured light treated them as solid cubes; they are thin strands now.
Light haze no longer flickers, looks layered or smears when you move. It’s now worked out at half resolution with twice the samples and smoothed, instead of being re-randomised every frame. It’s also a bit cheaper than before.
Visual improvements
Moonlight shafts are a cold moonlit blue instead of grey. Moonlight on the ground stays neutral.
Defaults and presets
Light Haze in Caves defaults to 0.2 (was 0.5): a small, soft glow around each light underground. The slider also has new 0.1, 0.2 and 0.35 steps.
Signature Barebones is updated to the author’s own setup:
Now on: realistic water, damp stone, beacon beams, Deep Dark fog, sculk pulse, leaf rustle, lens droplets and water LOD.
Light Haze is 0.5 and bloom 0.5.
Shadow samples are 12.
3D items are off.

Lumenite 2.8.3

New features
Snow that settles. When it snows, block tops, leaves and exposed edges slowly turn white. The drifts are soft and natural, not pixel patterns. Deep snow slumps over block edges and droops down the sides in rounded lobes. When the snow stops it melts back over a few minutes and leaves the ground damp. It follows vanilla’s snow rules (biome temperature, height, open sky), so it stays off lake beds and out from under roofs and trees. It builds up gradually: about half covered two minutes into a storm, nearly all after six.
Beacon beams. Real round columns of light with a white-hot core, tinted by the beacon’s glass. They light the air and the blocks around them.
The Deep Dark. A cold, blue-black fog pools on the floor and drifts in banks. Sculk slowly breathes with a pulse of light that moves across it. The Warden’s Darkness effect now closes in: everything goes black past about 15 blocks, and the edges of your view close in with every throb.
Glass that bends light. Stained and tinted glass, ice, slime and honey blocks refract the world behind them, with faint colour fringes. The tint deepens when you look at them at an angle. (Off by default, on in Ultra.)
Shadows on water. A shadow over water now falls twice: faint and transparent on the surface, and refracted onto the floor underneath. It blurs with depth, and the caustics follow it.
Enchanted items glow. Enchanted armour, tools and held or dropped items glow in the dark and bloom. The glint drifts between violet, magenta and blue, with small stars twinkling along the streaks.
Smart shadow culling. The shadow pass no longer draws the entire loaded world every frame. Coloured light is unchanged. This is a big performance win with high render distances.
Visual improvements
Netherite is now a dark metal alloy that reflects in its own purple-brown, instead of a washed-out grey lacquer.
Snow, ice, rain and gem sparkles are now soft round points instead of square pixels that popped on and off. They stay sharp at a distance, form a glitter path toward the sun on snow, and stay attached to armour as it moves.
Damp stone has been rebuilt. Stone next to water soaks up from the waterline in ragged tongues, gets darker, and holds a soft reflection.
Light haze
Halos around lights are round and smooth instead of blocky.
Underground it’s toned down to a soft glow around each light instead of an orange fog, and you can tune it.
Distant torches no longer leave crawling blotches.
Pixelated shadows (Shadow Filter: Pixelated) now snap to the block-texture pixel grid. They’re crisp, block-aligned and stable, with a proper Minecraft look.
Sun reflections on water are brighter.
Particles
Effect particles glow brighter by default.
Falling leaves no longer glow.
Explosions and mace hits no longer turn into a blinding ball of bloom.
The lens flare no longer flickers when the sun shines through leaves.
Performance
The glowing light shafts are about 4x cheaper.
Screen-space sun rays are about 4x cheaper again, and skip entirely when no sky is visible.
Light haze does a third of the work it used to.
With Shader Grass off, terrain and shadows skip the grass-only processing stages.
Blocklight shadows skip empty air and lights that are out of reach.
The lens flare does 24 fewer reads per pixel.
Coloured shadows skip work where nothing see-through is in front.
The Physics Mod ocean is cheaper per pixel, with distant waves simplified.
Fixes
Spawners: the red squares around spawners are gone. Smoke is no longer treated as a light source.
Clouds and light haze over water: water no longer shows through clouds or light haze in front of it.
Feather cirrus clouds no longer get cut off along straight lines.
Rain beads no longer crawl over mobs.
Sparkles far from spawn no longer turn into stripes.
Loading errors: fixed three cases where the pack failed to load (a settings combination and two shader errors).
Snow footprints and damp shorelines now darken the ground correctly.
Mod support
Physics Mod: native support for Ocean Physics V3 (Physics Mod v188+), plus the older ocean on the 1.21.11 Pro build (v183).
The mod’s waves, normals and foam are drawn with Lumenite’s full water shading. The mod’s foam becomes Lumenite’s lacy, lit whitecaps.
Physics Mod snow uses the snow material.
Dense smoke and rain plumes no longer glow at night.
New settings
Snow That Settles: on by default and in Signature, High and Ultra.
Beacon Beams, Beacon Glow
Deep Dark Fog, Sculk Pulse, Darkness Effect
Glass Refraction
Water Shadows: on in every preset except Potato.
Shadow Culling: Smart (default) or Everything (the old behaviour).
Enchant Glow: 0 gives the plain vanilla glint.
Light Haze in Caves: how much light haze is left underground. The default is 0.5.
A new New & Experimental page on the main settings screen. Glass Refraction and Snow That Settles are also on Quick Settings.

Lumenite V2.7.1

Nether portal

The portal is dreamy again. The swirling 3D texture stays crisp, but now sits inside a glassy, see-through glow. The colour builds up like a glowing mist in the depths of the portal and gently shimmers. The edges catch a soft glassy sheen when you look at them from an angle, and you can see through the thinner parts to the world behind.

Fixes

Sun rays no longer flicker. The glow around the sun used to jump in brightness every time a leaf swayed in front of it. It now fades smoothly as leaves move, and the glow near the sun is softer so it no longer shimmers.
Campfires and soul campfires that have been put out no longer give off light, haze or glowing logs. The same goes for redstone lamps that are off and respawn anchors with no charges.
Leaving the Nether or the End no longer carries bloom and brightness back into the overworld. Coming back used to flash bright and blurry for a couple of seconds, especially if you had left the overworld at night or from somewhere dark. The overworld now starts at the right brightness straight away.

Nether

Slightly more saturated colours. The Nether looked a little washed out after the last update; rock and fog now have a bit more colour, and lava stays orange.
Lava glows. Lava seas, fire and magma now have a real bloom and a warm glow in the air around them, while rock lit by lava stays dark.

Lumenite V2.7
Water: rebuilt from scratch
Realistic water colour. Water now gets its colour the way real water does, from how it absorbs and scatters light, using values from published measurements. Coastal sea is a dark blue-teal instead of bright saturated blue, forest lakes are olive, swamps are tea-coloured, and shallows show the bottom tinted by the water above it.
New waves. A wind-driven wave pattern with 11 sizes of waves, from 6 blocks long down to tiny ripples. They run with the wind and each moves at its own realistic speed, replacing the old repeating ripple pattern.
No more grain. Waves too small to see turn into a soft roughness instead of flickering noise. Distant water stays clean, the sun's glitter path is smooth, and reflections smear softly like on a real lake.
More accurate reflections. Water's real reflectivity is used, so it's darker head-on and a near-perfect mirror toward the horizon.
Light through the waves. When you look toward a low sun, wave faces glow green-turquoise as light passes through them.
Underwater: real Snell's window. Looking up from underwater, the whole sky and shoreline squeeze into a circle overhead, the edge ripples and shatters with the waves, and the waves match the surface exactly.
Weather-driven whitecaps. Almost none in fair weather, more in rain, lots in storms.
Cleaner foam. Its finest pattern no longer fizzes in the distance.
Caustics follow the waves. The light patterns on the seabed now come from the new waves.
New option: Wave Style. Pick the new Wind Sea waves or the Classic ones.
Vanilla texture off by default. The vanilla water texture overlay is now off in the Signature, Signature Barebones and Bare Bones Optimized presets. It's still available in settings and gentler when on.
Mod water matches. Distant Horizons and Voxy water use the same new look.
Glow: new features and a new Glow tab
Sun Glare. The sun's reflection on water, plus the brightest snow and ice sparkles, throws a wide halo and a slight squint-inducing haze.
Shaft Glow. Where sunlight breaks through leaves, ridges or cloud edges, the gaps glow.
Light Haze. Torches, lanterns, glowstone and lava light the air around them. It's thicker in rain and caves, sits as a glowing layer over lava seas in the Nether, and stops at walls.
Sparkle Glow. Snow glitters (and catches torchlight at night), ice sparkles, and wet ground after rain gets glints from water droplets.
New Glow tab. Every glow-related setting in one place. They also stay on their original screens.
Particle glow fixed. Potion effect swirls now glow for nearly every effect, not just a few, and other magical particles glow too.
The Nether: softer, less burnt
Less burnt colour. Lighting no longer turns everything flat red, and lava light is warm orange instead of pure saturated orange.
Real fog. Distance now fades softly into a glowing haze that warms near the lava seas, and the void behind it matches the fog exactly.
New tone curve. Shadows are deep but never pure black or pure red, and lava rolls off as warm orange instead of clipping to flat yellow.
Bloom in the Nether. Lava, fire, glowstone, shroomlights and soul fire now glow, with a soft halo in their own colour.
Particles fixed. Ash, spores and smoke are no longer black specks.
Aurora: completely rebuilt
Real curtains. Folding curtains of light in the northern sky, made of fine shimmering vertical rays.
Real colours. Oxygen green in the body, faint red tops, and a pink-violet hem on the sharp lower edge when it surges.
Overhead view. Look straight up and you see up into the rays.
Reflections. Still water reflects it.
Armour, tools and third person
Reflective armour. Iron, gold, chainmail, netherite, copper and turtle armour each have their own material. Diamond armour and gem trims sparkle like cut gems.
Armour no longer goes dark. It now reflects the sunlit world around it, not just the dim sky.
Tools. Iron, gold, diamond and netherite tools and weapons reflect properly in third person and when dropped. Handles stay wood.
Natural skin. Your player model gets soft, natural skin shading: light wraps around the shadow edge, there's a warm glow where light passes under the skin, and a faint sheen.
Portals
Voxel Nether portal. The animated texture becomes real 3D voxel cubes that rise and fall with the animation. It's crisp, not blurry.
Portal light colours. Nether portals cast purple light, and End portals cast a soft green glow.
Lighting
Softer block light. Light from blocks is softer and more realistic, and coloured light keeps its true colour.
Fade-in on load. When the shader loads, block light spreads outward from each light source and the image eases in over a couple of seconds. It ends at exactly the normal look.
Ice glitters. Ice now has its own material and sparkles.
Presets and performance
Bare Bones Optimized rebuilt. It's now based on Signature Barebones and aims for 130+ fps on mid-range laptops. Changes include volumetric clouds on, lower-resolution clouds, and lower water detail in the distance.
Signature Barebones. End sky set to Ultra and black hole quality to 110.
New options: Cloud Resolution and Water Detail LOD.
Fixes
Removed the brown strip that moved across the ring planet in the End, plus a leftover debris ring.
Debris-belt rocks no longer flip their lighting from one side to the other.
Fixed screen blur that followed your own movement (TAA).
Fixed picked-up items glowing and oversaturating in dark places.
Fixed light leaking into cave edges, especially in newly loaded chunks.
Stonecutter saw blades now cast block-light shadows.
Fixed lanterns underfoot breaking block-light shadows, and the player affecting them.
Replaced the cloud noise with Lumenite's own.

release version