SunWell

[2.1.0] — One lamp, four skies

The lantern stopped being a lamp with a glow on it and became a window. The orb now shows the sky it stands in for — sun, moon, rain cloud, or thunderhead — and it changes when the real sky changes, at the speed the real sky changes.

Added

• The orb mirrors the sky. Four orbs with their own artwork, colour, brightness and halo — sun, moon, rain cloud, and storm cloud. Whatever is overhead is what is in the lantern.
• Sky-driven transitions. Day → dusk → night → dawn rides Minecraft's own dusk ramp (the same curve getSkyDarken uses), so the orb darkens on exactly the world's schedule — the full ~90 seconds of real in-game twilight, stretched to fit. Rain and thunder ride vanilla's own weather ramps (~5 seconds). Nothing runs on a timer of its own, so the lantern can't lag the sky or run ahead of it.
• Orb → cloud morph. The orb flattens and spreads as cloud cover rolls in, and the cloud rises out of that same pose, so the change reads as one continuous shape instead of a swap. Sun → moon is a straight cross-fade — one round orb dissolving into another.
• Lightning flashes the orb. A thunderstorm sky-flash snaps the orb and its halo to white, in sync with the real bolt.
• Rain and snow fall from the shaft under a ceiling lamp, spawning across the lit cone and splashing where they land — using Sunwell's own rain particle, so it looks the same whether or not a weather mod is installed.
• Sprinkler for floor lamps. A lantern standing on the ground has nothing to rain "down" into, so it throws its weather outward and up, arcing back down across the radius it lights.
• Cone lighting ("small sun"). A ceiling lamp's virtual sky light spreads in a downward-widening cone: the higher the lamp, the wider it lights the floor below. New coneSpread config (0 = a straight column). A floor lamp still lights a disc around itself.
• Ceiling lamps light the floor. Virtual sky light renders below a lamp whenever you're near it, so rooms and caves under a lantern are genuinely lit like a skylight instead of only by the lantern's short-range block light. (Previously it was only visible during rain.)
• Lightning through the lantern — a rare visual bolt strikes down a full-profile column during thunderstorms, and far more often when a vanilla lightning rod is within 4 blocks (new lightningRodBoost). Visual-only by default: flash and sound, no fires.
• NeoForge 1.21.1 support, alongside 1.20.1 / Forge. (The 1.21.1 build does not bundle the optional Amendments wall/hand-lantern integration.)

Changed

• One universal lamp. The Sunwell Lantern now covers every sky itself — see Removed below.
• Light shafts are sunlight only. They're a sunbeam: full in clear daylight, gone at night and under cloud. A moon or an overcast sky doesn't cast god rays. (Previously they lengthened and brightened in storms, which read backwards.)
• Lantern block light 15 → 8. The lamp lights the room through its sunwell, not by being a torch; 15 washed the room flat and hid the orb entirely.
• The orb no longer strobes. The fast "crackle" flicker in storms read as the texture tearing. The storm is carried by the artwork, tint and dimming instead; only a gentle breathe remains.
• Default reach increased: maxDepth 24 → 40, with a larger flood budget to afford the wider cone.
• The glow is drawn without writing to the depth buffer, so it no longer shimmers or tears against the cage as the camera moves, and reads as a soft round halo rather than a flat square.

Fixed

• The moon never appeared. The orb's time of day was read through a path that consults the daylight gamerule — and the client keeps its own unsynced copy of gamerules, so the orb could follow a virtual cycle unrelated to /time set and never reach night. It now reads the sun's actual angle.
• Rain showed the storm artwork. Plain rain reached 0.65 on the combined "storm" scale and tripped the thunderhead. Rain and thunder are now separate signals.
• The orb was ~4× too dark at night. The sky tint was applied twice, stacking to ~23% brightness.
• Crash when changing the weather near active lamps (ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException during model tesselation). The published light "snapshot" was a shallow copy, so chunk-meshing worker threads read the very maps the flood was still rewriting. Snapshots are now real deep copies.
• Removing a lamp now clears its light — the region no longer stays "exposed to sky" after the source is gone, and it updates immediately instead of waiting for a nearby block change.
• Rain-through open-sky checks (rain collectors, cauldrons filling, snow accumulation) work again through tagged sunwell columns during active weather.

Removed

• The Soulwell Lantern. One lamp now presents every sky, so a separate soul variant no longer has a job. This is breaking — see Migration.

Migration

• Soulwell Lantern is gone. Placed Soulwell Lanterns will not survive the update, and any recipe, tag, or KubeJS script referencing sunwell:soulwell_lantern must be updated or removed.
• Existing configs pick up the new options on first launch; no manual edit needed.

Config

New / changed in config/sunwell-server.toml:

• coneSpread (default 1) — extra horizontal radius gained per block of descent; 0 = straight column.
• lightningRodBoost (default 40) — lightning is this many times more likely on a column with a lightning rod within 4 blocks.
• maxDepth default raised 24 → 40; nodeBudgetPerTick raised for the wider flood.
• debugSkyState (default false) — log which sky the orb is showing, to diagnose a mismatch.
• debugWeatherParticles (default false) — log why shaft rain/snow is or isn't spawning.

[2.0.63]

Fixed

• Fixed a crash (ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException during block model tesselation) that could occur when changing the weather in areas with active sunwell lamps.

[2.0.62]

Added

• Radiant orb glow + rotating light shafts; storm-reactive orb (dim/cool/flicker in rain and thunder).
• Rare lightning through full-profile lantern columns during thunderstorms, boosted near a lightning rod (lightningRodBoost).

Fixed

• Removing a lone lamp now properly clears its virtual-sky region instead of leaving it lit.
• Weather sky-access (rain collectors, cauldrons, snow) restored through rain-through columns.
• Glow no longer z-fights / "tears" against the cage; renders as a soft round halo.

[2.0.61]

Fixed

• Rain-through open-sky checks (canSeeSky) apply again during weather.

Removed

• Stale packaging leftovers cleaned out of the jar.