Better Brightness Setup

Vanilla Minecraft gives you a single brightness slider with no preview, so you end up setting it blind. Too dark and caves are a black void, too bright and everything looks flat and washed out. This mod adds a real setup screen so you can see what you're actually doing.

What it does

The setup screen shows four tiles: a creeper in the dark, deepslate, coal ore and diamond ore, each at a different light level. As you drag the slider they're lit with Minecraft's real lightmap gamma curve (the same one the game uses), so they brighten and darken exactly like those blocks would down in a cave.

So you just set the slider until the creeper stays hidden but the diamond ore is still clearly visible, and you've got a brightness that fits your screen instead of a guess.

A few other things it does:

Opens once on a fresh install, after Minecraft's own onboarding/accessibility screens.
Can be reopened any time: in Video Settings the gamma slider is swapped for a "Setup Brightness" button.
Works with Sodium - the calibration icons show up inline under its own brightness slider
Lets you go past vanilla's 100% cap. A config option (in the mod list) raises the max up to 500% for dark monitors, and it sticks across restarts.
Is translated into every Minecraft language (the major ones checked by hand), plus Pirate, LOLCAT and upside-down.

Compatibility

Client-side only, so it's fine to join any server with it. Runs on Fabric, Quilt, Forge and NeoForge. Requires Cloth Config. Optionally uses Mod Menu (config button on Fabric/Quilt) and Sodium (inline icons).

Preview

better brightness setup

Architectury API

Cloth Config API (Fabric/Forge/NeoForge)