NeoLux

A new look for the overworld: strong, warm sunlight against quiet shade, a sky with a palette of its own, soft volumetric clouds and dark, mirroring water.

Added

• Procedural volumetric clouds in place of the vanilla ones: a layer above the player, marched from base to top, lit towards the sun and shaded inside, so the puffs have a bright rim and a darker core. They show in water reflections too. CLOUD_STYLE switches between NeoLux, vanilla and none; the new Clouds page has cover, height, thickness, quality, speed and brightness.
• A soft tonemap (TONEMAP 4, the new default): linear through the midtones with a long shoulder, no toe, so shade keeps its detail.
• Lens flare along the line from the sun through the middle of the screen. LENS_FLARE on the Post Processing page.
• SHADE_DESATURATION: surfaces lit only by the sky lose part of their color and read grey next to the sunlit side.
• MOON_BRIGHTNESS, separate from the sun.
• Water gets fine ripples on top of the swell, which breaks up the reflection the way a real surface does.

Changed

• The overworld sky, sunlight and ambient light run on their own palette that follows the height of the sun instead of the vanilla sky and fog colors. The vanilla fog color turns with the direction the camera faces, which tinted the whole sky differently whenever the player turned. The Nether and the End keep the vanilla driven colors.
• Sunlight is stronger and ambient light weaker, and block faces are shaded by their orientation, so shade has contrast and depth again.
• Fog is an aerial haze now: barely any on a clear day within the first hundred blocks, thicker at night and in rain, and brightest towards a low sun.
• Bloom trades part of each pixel for its blurred copy instead of being added on top, and with the threshold at zero every pixel takes part. That is the soft glow around bright surfaces; it no longer brightens the whole frame.
• Water is darker, drops the vanilla texture pattern and takes only the biome color, and reflects the full sky.
• The sun is bright enough to burn out and feed the bloom, tinted warm when it stands low.
• Shadow lookups are compared and filtered in hardware, so shadow edges ramp over the texels instead of stepping from one to the next.
• Defaults: EXPOSURE 1.00, SATURATION 1.00, CONTRAST 1.00, VIGNETTE_STRENGTH 0.35, SKY_BRIGHTNESS 1.00, SUN_BRIGHTNESS 8.00.

Fixed

• The sun lit caves beyond the shadow distance: past the shadow map the lookup reports "lit", so direct light now also needs sky light to reach a surface.
• Half of every flower and grass tuft went black. A plant is two crossed quads and one of them always faces away from the sun; the shadow lookup was pushed along that back facing normal, away from the light and into the shade of the plant itself. Plants are now lit as if they faced straight up, like the ground they grow out of, take no normal offset in the shadow lookup but a depth bias and a softer filter, and let light wrap around and shine through them against the sun. Leaves have a material of their own and let more light through than grass does.
• Flowers threw square shadows. The shadow map sees a plant quad at a slant and the texture lookup picked a coarse mip level for it, where the cutout of the flower had averaged out into a solid square. The shadow pass reads the base level now and drops texels below the same cutout as the main pass.
• Newer plants were lit like stone blocks: bushes, firefly bushes, dry grass, wildflowers, eyeblossoms, cactus flowers, dead bushes and saplings wave with the wind now, mushrooms, fungi and azaleas are lit as foliage.
• Menu names were missing for WATER_REFRACTION, WATER_BLUR, CAUSTICS and WETNESS.