Enhanced Darkness

*True darkness for Minecraft. Built for horror.* Minecraft's night isn't dark — it's a dim grey you can read by. **Enhanced Darkness** fixes that. Caves fall to true black, the night sky stops glowing, and you actually need a torch to move after dark. No new blocks, no new items, no server install — just honest, oppressive darkness, made for horror modpacks. ## Features - **True black** — rewrites the lightmap so unlit areas reach real black instead of vanilla's grey floor. - **Dark skies** — the night sky, horizon fog and clouds are darkened too, so you can't read the terrain by silhouette. - **No cheating the dark** — the video brightness slider is overridden; cranking it won't save you. - **Plays fair** — Night Vision, the Warden's *Darkness* effect and Conduit Power all still work. - **Live config** — every slider changes the world under your cursor. No restart, no reload. - **Per-dimension** — the Overworld, Nether and End each have their own numbers, all editable in game. - **Client-side** — install it locally and play on any server, vanilla or modded. ## Optional, off by default The mod ships as pure darkness. This changes how a night *feels*, so it is yours to turn on: - **Moonlight** — a full moon lights the ground; a new moon is the darkest night of the month. All eight phases are honoured in proportion to the game's own table, so a crescent gives exactly a quarter of a full moon. Rain dims it, a thunderstorm kills it, and caves stay black either way. And one thing that is on by default, because it is a fix rather than a flavour: - **Lightning flashes** — a strike lights up the world again. Without it the mod swallowed the flash whole and a thunderstorm looked like any other night. ## Presets | Preset | Feel | | --- | --- | | **Soft** | Darker than vanilla, still comfortable to play. | | **Realistic** | Night and caves are genuinely dark. | | **Nightmare** | Default. No light source, no vision. For horror. | **Dim light sources stay dim.** The darkness curve is applied on top of vanilla's own falloff, so a weak source loses much more than a bright one. In vanilla a redstone torch reads at roughly a quarter of a torch; under **Nightmare** it is closer to a fiftieth — which means a redstone torch lights essentially nothing. That is the preset doing its job, not a bug. If you build with redstone in the dark, drop the gamma or switch to **Realistic**. ## Settings ModMenu → gear. Three tabs — *Darkness*, *Night & weather*, *Dimensions* — and every slider applies while you drag it, so you can tune the dark while standing in it. Save writes `config/enhanceddarkness.json`; Cancel puts everything back. ## How it works Minecraft 26.1 moved lightmap generation onto the GPU. Enhanced Darkness ships its own lightmap shader that keeps vanilla's colours — the Nether's warm glow, the blue of night — and multiplies each of the 256 light levels by a custom darkness curve. Sky, fog and clouds are dimmed separately, since they aren't part of the lightmap. Nothing is a flat black overlay: the darkness is computed per light level, so it looks right. ## Inspired by True Darkness Enhanced Darkness owes its idea to **[True Darkness](https://github.com/grondag/darkness) by Grondag** — the mod that first made Minecraft nights genuinely dark. This one takes that idea further: built natively for 26.1's GPU lighting, it darkens the sky rather than just the ground, and stays lean and focused on one job. Full credit to Grondag for the original. ## Installation 1. Install **[Fabric Loader](https://fabricmc.net/use/)** for Minecraft **26.1.2** or **26.2**. 2. Install **[Fabric API](https://modrinth.com/mod/fabric-api)**. 3. Run **Java 25** — Minecraft 26.1 requires it. 4. *(optional)* **[ModMenu](https://modrinth.com/mod/modmenu)** for the settings button. 5. Drop the jar into `mods` — take the one matching your game version. ## Compatibility - **Client-side** — works on any server, nothing to install server-side. Nothing in the world emits light and nothing is sent anywhere: other players see the darkness they always did. - **Shader packs** (Iris / OptiFine) replace the lighting pipeline and will override the effect. - **Performance mods** (Sodium and friends) hook the vanilla lightmap — test them in your pack. ## License MIT — source on [GitHub](https://github.com/EntonioDMI/enhanced-darkness).