🌌 Gloamveil

Look up. The sky is alive.

A realistic sky and weather system for Minecraft Java 1.20.1. It is a shader pack plus a companion mod, built from real photographs taken from the ground, real optics and real astronomy.

Minecraft 1.20.1 · Forge + Oculus · Fabric + Iris · 31 sky events · 6 presets incl. Horror

✨ What is Gloamveil?

Gloamveil replaces the flat vanilla sky with a living atmosphere. The Sun really scatters through the air. Clouds have volume. The Moon goes through its phases, and planets sit where real geometry puts them. Rare events like eclipses, auroras, comets and rainbows happen on their own schedule, and every player on a server sees the same sky at the same time.

Nothing is a painted texture. Rainbows bend at the real 42° angle, halos sit at exactly 22°, the Moon is the right size, and Saturn's rings only show when you zoom in. Everything is calculated, so everything reacts: to the time of day, the weather, the clouds, the terrain and you.

🌅 The Sky by Day

☀️ The Sun & Atmosphere

A physically based atmosphere scatters sunlight the way Earth's air does. Midday skies are deep blue, the horizon turns milky with haze, and the Sun's disk has its real size and soft, darkened edges.

🌄 Sunrise & Sunset

The Sun sinks through layers of air and the sky burns through gold, orange, crimson and violet. Clouds catch the last light from below. The Earth's shadow rises in the east as a blue-grey band with a pink glow above it.

🌫️ Haze, Fog & Sunbeams

Cool dawns fill valleys with fog that pools in low ground. When the Sun breaks through, crepuscular rays fan out through the mist.

☁️ Clouds

⛅ Cumulus: Fair-Weather Clouds

Puffy, sunlit clouds with bright tops and grey bases, scattered at random sizes like a real summer sky. They drift with the wind and cast moving shadows on the ground.

🪶 Cirrus

Thin, feathery ice clouds high in the sky, stretched into strands by high-altitude wind.

🌥️ Overcast

A heavy grey ceiling that softens every shadow and dims the world.

⛈️ Storms

🌩️ Thunderstorms

Towering cumulonimbus with anvil tops build on the horizon, darken the land and drag curtains of rain beneath them. Thunder arrives after the flash, delayed by the distance.

⚡ Lightning

Branched, jagged bolts with a white-hot core and a violet glow. Each flash is several return strokes that flicker and pulse. Cloud-to-ground bolts strike the horizon, and intracloud lightning lights the storm from inside.

🫧 Mammatus

Pouch-like clouds that hang beneath a storm's anvil, among the strangest sights in the sky. At sunset and sunrise they glow orange and gold.

🌧️ Rain Shaft

A dark column of rain falling from a distant cloud, visible from kilometres away.

💧 Rain & Water

🌦️ Three Stages of Rain

💦 Real Raindrop Impacts

Every drop that lands on water follows the physics of a real impact:

1. A tiny crown splashes at contact
2. Concentric rings spread outward, several in a row
3. A Worthington jet shoots up from the collapsing crater
4. A bead pinches off its tip, falls back and starts a new ring

Wet ground behaves the same way: once it's soaked, drops ring and splash on stone, roads and roofs too.

🏊 Splashes from You

Jump into water and you throw a crown of droplets, spread big rings and send up a central column of water. Wading leaves a wake. Walking or landing on wet ground splashes with every step. The vanilla pixel splashes and the underwater overlay are gone.

🌊 Water

Wind-driven waves, sunlight caustics on the riverbed, real reflections of the sky and clouds, and foam along the shore.

🪟 Wet World

After rain, stone darkens, surfaces turn glossy, puddles form on flat ground, and water drips from roof edges and leaves.

🌈 Light in the Air

🌈 Rainbows

Real optics: red on the outside, violet inside, a brighter sky within the bow, and a darker band between the main bow and the fainter secondary bow, whose colours are reversed. A rainbow only appears where sunlit rain actually is, so it might arc fully, fade halfway, show only one side or disappear behind a mountain. Low Suns give tall, red-warm bows.

💍 Sun Halo & Sundogs

A delicate 22° ring around the Sun, reddish on its inner edge and fading to white, with a darker sky inside. It only forms in thin, icy high cloud. Sundogs glow on either side of the Sun. At night, look for the same ring around the Moon.

🌙 The Night Sky

🌑 The Moon: All 8 Phases

A detailed, textured Moon with real craters, the right size and the right phase. The dark side of a crescent faintly glows with earthshine.

✨ Stars & Milky Way

Thousands of real catalogue stars in their true constellations, slowly turning around the pole star, with the Milky Way across dark skies. Zoom in and fainter stars appear.

🪐 Planets

🌟 Rare Events

🌌 Aurora

No two displays are alike. Each aurora picks 1 to 4 long, glowing bands in random places around the sky, each with its own shape (a comet-like streak, a smooth ribbon or a string of bright knots) and its own colours: classic green, green with pink or red tops, magenta-violet, teal-blue or yellow-green. The bands fold, ripple and shimmer with fine vertical rays, and they cast a soft coloured light over the land below.

☄️ Comets

A glowing head with a long tail that always points away from the Sun. Zoom in for jets and streaks inside the tail.

🌠 Meteors, Showers & Fireballs

Single shooting stars, whole showers radiating from one point in the sky, and rare blazing fireballs.

🔴 Red Sprites

Brief red flashes above a distant thunderstorm, rarely seen and over in an instant.

🌘 Eclipses

🌞 Solar Eclipses

Watch the Moon slide across the Sun. In a partial eclipse a bite is taken out of the Sun. In a total eclipse the day goes dark, the corona blooms and stars come out at noon. In an annular eclipse a ring of fire remains.

🔴 Lunar Eclipse: the Blood Moon

The Moon passes into Earth's shadow and turns a deep copper-red, lit only by every sunrise and sunset on Earth at once.

👻 Horror-Dark Nights

Made for horror modpacks. Nights are truly dark: the sky keeps a faint glow while the ground sinks into shadow, torches become small islands of warm light, and fog creeps in. Pick the HORROR preset for cold, desaturated nights with heavy fog and dimmed torches.

🎲 A Sky That Runs Itself

• 🗓️ Every day is planned: clear days, cumulus days, overcast, rain and storms, each with real probabilities.
• 🔒 Fair and stable: every chance is rolled once and remembered, so reloading, sleeping or reconnecting never re-rolls the sky.
• 🌐 Shared: the server owns the weather, so all players see the same events.
• 🧭 Discovery Assistance: rare events like auroras won't go unseen forever. If one is overdue, the odds gently rise.
• 🗺️ Regional: cold regions see more auroras, humid regions more morning fog.

⚙️ Presets & Settings

There are dozens of options covering cloud and fog resolution, cloud detail and distance, atmosphere quality, shadows, ambient occlusion, reflections, lightning and aurora quality, rainbow strength, aurora ground light, torch and hand-light strength, rain opacity, puddles, ripples, bloom, saturation, exposure, and an accessibility option to reduce flashing.

📦 Installation

Forge: Forge 47.x + Oculus (+ Embeddium recommended) Fabric: Fabric Loader + Fabric API + Iris

1. Put gloamveil in your mods folder
2. Put Gloamveil-shaderpack.zip in your shaderpacks folder
3. In-game, open Video Settings → Shader Packs and select Gloamveil

💡 The shader pack also works without the mod, with a simpler built-in sky schedule, but the full event schedule and server-synced weather need the mod.

🌌 Gloamveil: the light between day and night.