🌑 Truly Dark

Minecraft nights weren't meant to be a lit blue dome over a visible world.

Real cave darkness · real night darkness · real horizon darkness · tuneable per layer

🤝 Companion Mod

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/truly-bright

🔦 The Pitch

Vanilla Minecraft calls it "night" but leaves you standing under a bright moon, a glowing blue sky gradient, a softly lit cloud layer, and a gray horizon band that betrays every mountain silhouette from half a kilometer out.

Truly Dark turns the lights off.

Caves become genuinely black except for what you light yourself. Overworld nights feel like nights — the sky dome, the fog band, and the cloud plane all drop together so torches matter, lanterns matter, seeing something in the distance matters. Moon phase still counts. Weather still counts. But by default, new-moon midnight in the open is the darkest time of the game, not a slightly blue afternoon.

> If you've ever placed a torch by instinct and watched it illuminate nothing because the ambient sky was already doing that job for you — this mod was made for that exact moment.

🌒 What It Actually Darkens

Every layer of the "night sky looks bright" problem, independently:

• 🕳️ Caves & block shadows — lightmap reworked so unlit areas are black, not dusty blue
• 🌌 The sky dome — gradient drops with the day/night curve down to your configured floor
• 🫧 The horizon fog band — scaled in lockstep so you don't get a lit gray strip under a black sky
• ☁️ Clouds — dim with the sky so they're not floating glow sheets at midnight
• 🌙 Sun, moon & stars — alpha scales with sky darkness; a full moon still lights things, a new moon barely does
• 🔥 Nether & End fog — separate sliders for their own atmospheres

All of it is moon-phase-aware and weather-aware out of the box.

🎛️ Three Presets. Three Vibes.

On first launch you pick the feel you want:

All three are one click. You can fine-tune any slider afterwards. Or reset setup_version=Auto in the config file to see the picker again.

🎚️ Fine Control When You Want It

Every layer has its own 0.0 → 1.0 floor slider. 0.0 = effectively black at peak darkness; 1.0 = vanilla.

• sky_darkness — the dome above you
• fog_darkness — the band at the horizon
• cloud_darkness — the cloud plane
• moon_phase_intensity — how much the moon contributes to the night
• dark_nether_fog / dark_end_fog — per-dimension fog sliders

Per-dimension master toggles for Overworld / Nether / End / modded sky / modded skyless. A biome blacklist for mods that ship their own lit-cave biomes (Alex's Caves Primordial Caves and Candy Cavity are pre-populated — harmless when the mod isn't installed).

Reachable in-game from ModMenu (Fabric / Quilt) or the Mods screen (Forge / NeoForge). Persisted to config/trulydark.properties.

🛠️ Compatibility

Built for Minecraft 1.20.1. Drop the matching JAR into your mods folder and you're set.

We support Forge, NeoForge, Fabric and Quilt on both the 1.20.1 and 1.21.1 Minecraft versions at this time.

✅ Client-only in function — no server-side gameplay changes

✅ Dedicated-server safe — ships with gated initializers so the jar can sit on a server for mod-list parity without touching rendering code

✅ Multiplayer-safe — no packets, no protocol changes

✅ No extra dependencies (besides Fabric API on Fabric / Quilt)

⚠️ About Shaders (Iris / Oculus / OptiFine)

Shader mods replace Minecraft's entire lighting pipeline. When a shader pack is active, Truly Dark's effects has the potential to be bypassed — and there's no way around that from the mod's side without both me and the pack author working together on a GLSL + shaders.properties snippet which is unlikely to happen - but don't fret, keep on reading!

Note that SOME SHADER PACKS will actually be compatible with Truly Dark natively because simple packs (e.g Sildur's Lite, default-configured BSL, vanilla-plus) do something like color *= texture2D(lightmap, lmcoord); — that samples our darkened pixels and the effect comes through for free. Heavy packs that reconstruct ambient from scratch don't. It's pack-dependent, so try it out for yourself and maybe post a comment to help people know what does and doesn't work!

tl;dr some packs will work, others will not

The config screen detects Iris/Oculus and shows a warning. To get the same feel under a shader, open your shader pack's own settings and set:

• Cave Darkness / Cave Lighting → 0
• Night Brightness / Moonlight Strength → 0

⚠️ Modpack Creators/Server Owners

Truly Dark supports Modpack Creators in several ways. The config file has indepth explanation for features as well as forced mod requirement for dedicated servers and modpack author user config hard disables to prevent players messing with settings easily in packs where you have an intended vision.

Truly Dark ships User First but can be configured to be Modpack First / Server First with little to no technical knowledge.

🚫 What It Is Not

• ❌ Not a horror mod — it doesn't add mobs, jumpscares, or events
• ❌ Not a shader — it works without shaders, and doesn't try to compete with them
• ❌ Not a server-side gameplay change — other players see their own vanilla world
• ❌ Not aggressive — every layer is tuneable, three built-in presets, one-click opt-out

Just: darker when the game says it's dark.

Turn the lights off. Keep the game on.

Mod by dylanjkl · All Rights Reserved