Better Night

Better Night

Vanilla night has one brightness: a moonless thunderstorm is as bright as a clear full moon. Better Night makes the night depend on the moon, the weather and how long you have been in the dark. Client side only. Under a shader pack it stands down by default.

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Presets

• Five presets: Vanilla+, Subtle, Balanced, Dark and Pitch Black. Balanced is the default.
• Vanilla+ keeps the nights different from each other without making them dark. Pitch Black needs a light source.
• No preset goes darker than an unlit cave.

Moon and weather

• A full moon lights the ground and a new moon barely does. The phases in between follow a brightness curve, not eight even steps.
• The moon rises and sets, so a full-moon night is brightest around midnight.
• Rain lets about 8 percent of the moonlight through, a thunderstorm under 1 percent.
• Only sky light changes: torches, lit builds, caves, night vision, the Nether and the End are untouched, and nothing gets brighter than vanilla.

Eyes

• Your eyes open up over about twelve seconds in the dark. A lightning flash, a torch or a lit room takes that away at once.
• Colour drains at low light: a red flower turns black under the moon while a blue one stays blue.

Night sky

• Stars are brightest at new moon and washed out by a full moon.
• The moon has a glow that grows with its phase, and reddens near the horizon.
• About six meteors a night, the same ones for every player on a server. Roughly one night in four brings a bolide.
• Fireflies on warm, rainless nights, most of them in swamps, jungles and forests.

Requirements

Minecraft 1.20.1 (Forge or Fabric, Java 17), 1.21.1 (NeoForge or Fabric, Java 21) or 26.2 (NeoForge or Fabric, Java 25). Fabric needs Fabric API. Client only. Settings: Mods, Better Night, Config on NeoForge and Forge, Sodium’s video settings on 1.21.1 and 26.2, the config file alone on Fabric 1.20.1. On 26.2 the night is less dark at the same settings.

Related mods

NeoForge 1.21.1 and 26.2, Forge 1.20.1, Fabric 1.20.1, 1.21.1 and 26.2. Client only. Free to use in modpacks.