Celestial Cycles

Look up. In vanilla Minecraft the sky is scenery: a small square sun, a small square moon, and a night that’s over in minutes. Celestial Cycles makes it worth watching. Days and nights last as long as you want, the moon’s phases change how dangerous each night is, and rare events give you a reason to stop what you’re doing and step outside.

Days and nights, your length
Choose exactly how many real minutes the day and the night last. By default the day runs 90 minutes and the night 25, compared with 10 each in vanilla.

Only the clock changes. The game’s tick rate stays the same, so crops, furnaces, mobs and redstone all run at normal speed, and sleeping through the night still works.

A moon that matters
The moon and sun are redrawn as true circles, three times wider than vanilla, with crescents you can actually recognize. Both sizes can be set from a quarter of vanilla’s width up to six times. At sunset, a message above your hotbar tells you tonight’s phase.

Each phase of the 8-day cycle changes the night:

Phase - Monsters - Sky
Full moon - 3 extra per minute - Brightest nights, faintest stars
Gibbous - 1 extra per minute - A little brighter than normal
Quarter - Normal - Normal
Crescent - 15% fewer spawns - A little darker, with brighter stars
New moon - 30% fewer spawns, but with 25% more health and damage - Darkest nights, brightest stars, and the Milky Way

Major events
Only one major event can happen per night, so each one feels special and the sky never gets crowded.

On full moons
 - Blood moon (30%): The sky turns red and the dangerous night of the cycle begins. Monsters pour in at 24 extra per minute, with 50% more health and 25% more damage, but they drop twice the items and twice the experience. You can’t sleep through it. If three full moons pass without one, the next is guaranteed.
 - Harvest moon (25%): A large golden moon rises, and crops and young animals near players grow four times as fast.
 - Lunar eclipse (20%): The moon slides into the world’s shadow and turns the color of copper, while the night darkens and the stars come out. It’s a sight, not a danger.
 - Supermoon (15%): The moon rises larger and brighter than usual.

On any night
 - Northern lights (25% on nights with no other major event): Curtains of color ripple across the northern sky, strongest in cold biomes.
 - Planetary alignment (2%): The planets line up, and monsters killed that night give double experience.
 - Comet (1.5%): A long-tailed visitor appears high in the northeast and stays for five nights, drifting a little further each night.

By day

 - Solar eclipse (50% on new moon mornings): The moon crosses the sun and day turns to night. Monsters come out in the darkness, with 12 extra per minute on top of what the dark already spawns, and you can’t sleep until the sun returns. If a new moon passes without one, the next is guaranteed.

Everyday sights
These don’t count as major events, so they can appear alongside any of the above.

 - Planets: Bright wanderers follow the sun’s path on every clear night.
 - Shooting stars: Streaks cross the clear night sky.
 - Fallen stars: Now and then a star lands near you, trailing light as it falls and sparkling where it lands. Use it for 30 experience, but reach it before it fades. Expect about one per 10 minutes of clear night under open sky.
 - Milky Way: It stretches across the sky on new moon nights and appears fainter on crescent nights.
 - Sun halo: A pale ring circles the sun on about 15% of days.

Make it yours
Nearly every number on this page can be changed. Use the in-game config screen in the Mods list, or edit config/celestial_cycles-common.toml. Changes apply while the game is running, with no restart needed. You can change event chances, monster counts and multipliers, moon and sun size, and northern lights brightness, or turn any event off entirely.

Bosses are left out of the moon’s monster toughening. Pack makers can exempt other mobs by adding them to the celestial_cycles:moon_ignored entity tag.

Commands
Anyone can check the current state:

/celestialcycles moon: tonight’s phase
/celestialcycles eclipse, lunareclipse or northernlights: whether that event is happening
Operators can start things for testing or for fun:

/celestialcycles moon <phase>: jump to a phase (full, waning_gibbous, last_quarter, waning_crescent, new, waxing_crescent, first_quarter, waxing_gibbous)
/celestialcycles <event> start or stop: control an event (bloodmoon, harvestmoon, supermoon, lunareclipse, eclipse, northernlights, alignment, comet, sunhalo)
/celestialcycles fallingstar: drop a star near you