Better Sky

Better Sky

Beta. An early build of the mod: expect bugs, you can report them on the Discord.

Vanilla’s sky is 1,500 random dots and one flat colour. Better Sky puts the real one there: catalogued stars, planets on their orbits, meteors, eclipses and a telescope to look at them through, in three looks (Soft, Trailer, Trailer with a black night). It goes on the server and the client.

Support me and get early access on my Patreon.

The sky

• 5,000 real stars at their true positions, brightnesses and colours, and 89 constellations: K shows the figures and names.
• The Milky Way, nebulae, clusters and galaxies in their real places. Mercury to Saturn move on real orbits.
• No two nights are alike: clarity drifts between murky and crystal, the same for everyone on a server.
• By day a gradient from a deep zenith to a hazy horizon, and twilight colours on both horizons.

Falling stars and eclipses

• Sporadic meteors, the nine annual showers on their real dates, fireballs, earthgrazers and satellites.
• A solar eclipse about every 29 days and a lunar one about every 19: partial, annular or total, with the corona and the diamond ring.
• /bettersky sky says what tonight holds.

The telescope

• A brass telescope you place: a spyglass, two copper ingots and three sticks. Scroll to zoom from 2x to 40x.
• Planets become discs: Venus in phases, Jupiter with its belts and four moons, Saturn with its rings.
• A readout names what the reticle is on.

Sleep

• Sleeping runs the night at high speed instead of skipping it: furnaces, crops, hoppers and redstone keep working.
• A full night takes ten to twenty seconds, and from the bed you watch the stars wheel.

Requirements

Minecraft 1.21.1, NeoForge 21.1, Java 21. It goes on the server and the client. Optional: Better Night. It stands down while an Iris shaderpack renders. Star data: the HYG database and d3-celestial by Olaf Frohn (BSD-3).

Related mods

NeoForge 1.21.1. Free to use in modpacks.