PBD - Pitch Black Darkness

Minecraft darkness is a lie. Even at light level 0, in the deepest cave, on a moonless night — you can always see something. PBD makes darkness real, and puts you in control of exactly how real.

Works on NeoForge and Fabric, for Minecraft 1.21.1 and 26.2. Plays nicely with Sodium, and — unlike every other darkness mod — it works with shader packs too. More on that below.

One number. That's the whole mod.

Pick your darkness level, from 0 (pure vanilla) to 5 (absolute pitch black):

Level	Unlit caves	Moonless night	Full moon night
0	vanilla	vanilla	vanilla
1	almost black	a bit darker	~vanilla
2	black	much darker	darker
3 (default)	black	nearly black	dark but navigable
4	black	black	very dark
5	absolute black	BLACK	barely a glow

Fractions work too — /pbd 0.5 keeps a hint of visibility even in unlit caves, for a subtle "vanilla but moodier" feel. The scale is fully continuous.

The moon actually matters

Like the classic True Darkness did, PBD ties night darkness to the moon phase: a full moon night stays navigable, a new moon night swallows you whole. Watch the sky — for the first time in Minecraft, you'll actually care what the moon looks like tonight. (Can be turned off, if you want every night equally dark.)

What it does NOT touch

Daylight is sacred. At every level, full daylight is pixel-identical to vanilla.
Torches still work. Light sources stay exactly as bright as vanilla — they just matter now. A torch at night stops being decoration and becomes survival.
Lightning still flashes. Thunderstorms light up even the blackest night, as they should.
The night sky stays visible: stars and moon above a pitch-black world, like a real moonless night.

Yes, it beats the Brightness slider

Cranking Brightness to max will not save you. PBD applies its darkness after the gamma curve, so at level 5, black is black — on any monitor, at any slider setting. No cheating.

It works with shader packs

Every other darkness mod stops here, and honestly so did this one at first. A shader pack replaces the whole lighting pipeline and draws its own light — it never reads the vanilla lightmap that darkness mods hook into. Nothing you inject can reach it. (Not even Mojang's own Warden darkness behaves right under most packs.)

So PBD stopped fighting the pack and started talking to it. When it recognizes the pack you're running, it writes dark-night and dark-cave values into that pack's own settings and reloads the shaders. Full shader quality, real darkness, nothing fighting anything.

It just happens. On by default — install, pick your pack, done.
Your settings are backed up first, and switching off Auto-darken the shader pack in Video Settings puts them back exactly as they were.
It asks once. If you brighten something yourself afterwards, PBD leaves it alone. Your pack, your call.
Recognized packs: BSL, Complementary (Unbound & Reimagined), Photon, Bliss, Hysteria, MakeUp Ultra Fast. For anything else PBD won't guess — /pbd shaders tells you which settings to look for instead.

Details

Client-side only. Works in singleplayer and on ANY server (it's your eyes, not the world). Safe to add or remove at any time.
Everything lives in Options → Video Settings, right next to Brightness. With Sodium — which replaces that screen with its own — the same options show up as a Darkness page inside it.
Or change level in-game with /pbd <0-5> (or /pitchblack) — instant effect, no restart.
Optional toggles for the Nether and the End (cave-darkness only — no sky light down there).
No dependencies. No config library, no mod menu. (Fabric needs Fabric API, as usual.)
Zero performance cost: everything is precomputed; when set to 0 the mod fully steps aside.

Credits

Behavior inspired by True Darkness by grondag (Fabric, up to 1.16). PBD is a from-scratch, clean-room implementation for NeoForge and Fabric — no code was ported.

A SaturnX Studios (STXS) mod.