SunWell

[2.2.0] - 2026-07-18 - Real lightning, real shader support

The strike is a strike now: it arcs from the orb, forks toward open space, floods the room with real light for an instant, and closes from the ground up as it dies. Shaderpacks (Iris/Oculus) and Sodium/Embeddium now see the sunwell the way vanilla always did.

Added

• World-aware lightning branches. Forks sample nearby directions and keep whichever has the most open room ahead, then clip their own length to stop right at the wall/floor/ceiling they actually reach — no more branches clipping through solid blocks. Growth speed scales per branch: a close target grows slowly, a far one lashes out fast.
• Real in-world strike lighting. A strike now flares genuine block light around its impact point — room-wide for the strike tick itself, contracting to a local glow through the leader/fade. Not just decorative geometry anymore.
• Bottom-up closing fade. The bolt visibly closes from the strike end upward as it dies, instead of dimming everywhere at once. Branches fade in step with the same sweep.
• Lightning favors height. A free strike (no rod) leans toward the tallest thing in the cone — a tree, an exposed mob or player, a raised ledge — while staying random. Never lands within a block of the lamp anymore.
• Sodium / Embeddium light fix. Both clone raw light data and mesh from the copy, bypassing the vanilla light engine entirely — sunwell rooms rendered pitch black under either. Reapplies the boost at their own read point instead.
• Shaderpack support (Iris / Oculus). The room now fills with real block light under a shaderpack (which doesn't render virtual sky light as brightness), the orb blooms at full brightness instead of reading as a flat disc, and the additive glow render type is registered under vanilla's own "lightning" name so Iris routes it through a known-working program instead of silently dropping the dimmest parts of the fade.
• Snow accumulation. Falling snow now actually piles up as snow layers on the floor while it's snowing, instead of just falling through. snowAccumulation, snowAccumulateOdds, snowMaxLayers.
• /sunwell lightning <odds> and /sunwell rodboost <mult>. Tune strike frequency live without editing the config; persists to disk.
• debugLightning. Logs where each strike lands and why, for diagnosing strikes hitting empty air or empty rooms.

Changed

• Lantern block light 8 → 15. A proper lantern glow on top of the sky-cone projection, not just the projected light alone.
• Rain covers the whole lit cone, not just the centre, and scales with weather (light drizzle vs. a real downpour in a storm).
• A wall- or low-mounted lantern now glows around itself immediately, instead of needing several blocks of drop before the cone opened wide enough to light anything.
• The lightning core is brighter, with an extra hyper-bright inner filament and wider soft bloom/halo layers, so the bolt reads as glowing in plain vanilla, not just under a shaderpack's own bloom pass.
• The return-stroke pulse actually climbs. Brighter, and given enough frames to visibly travel from strike to lamp instead of snapping through in about one tick.
• Held-lantern light shafts removed. They read as jank in hand; the orb's halo now correctly tells true first-person apart from third-person/other entities (including the Amendments hand-render path), so only a world-visible lantern shows sun shafts.

Fixed

• Dynamic Trees stopped growing — a since-reverted skyLevel experiment briefly dropped effective light below the growth threshold.
• Cannot get config value before config is loaded crash on world/server shutdown.
• Lightning god-ray light-shaft beams (added, then removed): didn't hold up well enough to ship, on or off a shaderpack.

Config

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

• lightningThroughOdds default 80000 → 40000; lightningRodBoost default 40 → 20
• skyLevel unchanged at 14 (kept growth-safe; see Fixed)
• snowAccumulation, snowAccumulateOdds, snowMaxLayers, debugLightning