Living Horizons

Living Horizons gives the vanilla world light, air and life, without shader packs. Every effect keeps Minecraft's own pixel style, runs entirely on the client and costs next to nothing.

Minecraft 26.3, 1.21.1 and 1.12.2 | Fabric · NeoForge · Forge | Works with Sodium | Client-side only

Light & shadow

• Sun shading: slopes turned away from the sun fall into cool shade and sunlit faces warm up. At sunrise the snow turns lavender and far mountains glow pink in the haze.
• Contact shadows: soft shading where blocks meet, under ledges and eaves, around trunks and grass. No grain, no harsh black edges.
• Light shafts: beams of sunlight stream past trees, hills and cloud edges when you look towards the sun.
• Sun glare: a soft glow around the sun that hides behind terrain, dims in the rain and turns golden at sunrise and sunset.
• Cave mouths glow with the daylight beyond them.

Air you can feel

• Depth haze: distant land fades into the colour of the sky, and the edge of the render distance melts away instead of cutting off.
• Biome atmosphere: warm, dusty air over deserts and badlands; a cold, pale mist over snowy lands.
• Snowstorms: snowfall in cold biomes becomes a whiteout that swallows the distance, the sky and the clouds.
• Dust storms: now and then a tan haze rolls over the desert, full of blowing sand and tumbleweeds.
• Cave gloom: underground, the distance sinks into darkness and the vignette deepens.
• Sky & colour: a deep blue overhead fading to a bright horizon, clouds with bright tops and bluish undersides, warm torchlight and cool moonlit nights.

Deserts and cold lands

• Tumbleweeds bounce along with the wind, sand drifts across the dunes, dust devils spin up on hot afternoons and vultures circle overhead.
• Snow flurries, spindrift blowing off the ground, ice that glints in the sun and little puffs of snow under your feet.

A forest that moves

• Swaying plants: grass, flowers, crops, leaves, vines and hanging moss move in the wind, and plants part as you walk through them.
• Twigs on trees: small 3D twigs built from each tree's own bark and leaves: needled spruce boughs, pink cherry sprigs, bare pale oak twigs and more. They bob in the wind.
• Grass tufts: small pixel blades on grass blocks that bend when anything walks through them.

Living water

• Surf: foam lines roll in along the shores of oceans, rivers and lakes, break against the blocks and wash back.
• Ripples spread from players, mobs, boats, dropped items and raindrops; still water gently waves.
• Morning mist gathers over the water in low, slowly churning banks.

Ambient life

• Butterflies over flowers, fireflies at night, flocks of birds and birds taking off from trees.
• Dragonflies and jumping fish over rivers and lakes.
• Dust in caves and sunbeams, meadow pollen, moths around lamps and visible breath in the cold.

Settings

Every effect can be switched off or tuned on four pages with live preview: Atmosphere, Light & Sky, Water & Plants and Life.

The key can be rebound in the Controls menu. Settings are also available from Mod Menu (Fabric) and the Mods list (NeoForge/Forge). Configuration is stored in config/livinghorizons.json.

Compatibility

• Sodium: fully supported, including swaying plants, water waves and the new light and shadows.
• Iris: while a shader pack is active, Living Horizons leaves light, vegetation and colour grading to the pack.
• Servers: not needed on the server and safe on any server. The mod adds no blocks, items or registry entries.
• Fabric requires Fabric API.
• Minecraft 1.12.2 (Forge) requires MixinBooter 11 or newer. It works with OptiFine; while an OptiFine shader pack is loaded, the light, sway and colour effects turn off and leave the look to the pack.

Performance

• Fog, light and colour tweaks adjust values the game already computes every frame.
• Light and shadows are one screen pass at the end of the world render, with no extra geometry.
• Swaying runs in the terrain shader from data written while chunks are built, with no per-frame CPU work.
• Particles have per-kind limits and follow the vanilla Particles setting; Minimal turns them off.

Community

Questions, ideas and bug reports: Discord