Sun

The sun is a celestial body that provides sky light for the Overworld.

Daytime

The sun and moon rise in the east and set in the west.

When the player creates a new world, the time is set to dawn and the sun starts on the horizon. As time passes, it slowly moves across the sky. As the sun sets, the moon rises. Overall, daytime lasts 10 minutes (in real-time).

Sunlight

Sunlight is the light cast from the sky that burns various undead mobs during daytime. Mobs can shelter from the sunlight by staying underneath any block that does not fully let light through, like glass does, therefore creating a shadow. Clouds can hide the sun, but do not technically block any light and let mobs still burn. During inclement weather, the sky darkens and reduces the amount of light in the world.

Strictly speaking, sunlight can be considered as the presence of both an internal sky light level of at least 12 and a sky light level of 15. Due to this, it is possible to burn undead mobs during rainy weather by covering them with glass.

For more information on how light affects the world, see Light § Effects of light.

The sun itself isn't visible when "Beautiful Skies" are turned off, or during precipitation (even in dry biomes in Java Edition). When the camera faces the sun in Bedrock Edition, the environment darkens and the sun grows slightly bigger. Furthermore, in Bedrock Edition, the sun is noticably bigger during sunset, and disappears at night, while it is still visible below the void in Java Edition​^{[until: JE 26.4]}. The sun has a pixelated glow texture, which brightens during sunset and sunrise.‌^{[BE only]}

With Vibrant Visuals, the sun is considered a global directional light source, which creates pixelated shadows from blocks, entities, and clouds on all objects. Water bodies exposed to sunlight create specular highlights on the surface, and project water caustics underwater. With direct diffuse, sunlight illuminates directly exposed surfaces and clouds with an illuminance of 100 lumen, faded during sunrise and sunset. Most cold biomes have brighter sunlight at dusk and dawn, dark forests are limited at 70 lumen, ice spikes at 50, and pale gardens at 5. Diffuse illumination is colored bright orange, fading slightly darker near sunrise and sunset, different shades of purple in mushroom fields,
 195, 216, 255 in pale gardens, and
 215, 224, 255 in ice spikes.

During sunrise and sunset, the sun creates glowing mie scattering in the atmospherics. Sunlight also creates volumetric fog and light shafts. Depending on the biome, this creates a glow around the sun and scattering effects in its direction, also visible underwater. Through cave openings, the directional lighting can also illuminate areas with lower sky light levels. Light bloom is also visible around the sun.

History

Java Edition

Bedrock Edition

Legacy Console Edition

Issues

Issues relating to "Sun" are maintained on the bug tracker. Issues should be reported and viewed there.

Trivia

• If the player is underwater or underground and looks at the sun, it appears the same as the sun at sunset. This is due to the way the sun is rendered when exposed to the sky.
• The sun's trajectory forms a perfect vertical circle perpendicular to the ground plane, passing directly through the zenith at noon. This occurs because the rendering logic does not apply any Z-axis rotation or offset to simulate axial tilt or latitude. As a result, the sun does not bias towards the south as it would in the Earth's Northern Hemisphere.
  • A custom orbital offset can be applied with Vibrant Visuals resource packs.

Gallery

Textures

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  Default sun texture
• 
  Vibrant Visuals sun texture

Screenshots

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  Example sunset seen from the top of a jungle tree
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  The setting sun in Bedrock Edition
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  Volumetric fog and mie scattering around a sunrise with Vibrant Visuals
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  The bloom around the sun with volumetric fog disabled
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  The sun viewed from high up, making it seem like the player is in space
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  Light beams falling into a cave
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  Dense fog makes the sun appear much less bright.
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  In Bedrock Edition, when looking at the sun, the sky gets slightly darker and the sun slightly larger.
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  The sun would look like this, if the player looks away or if the world is heading into the night.
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  Looking down from a large height at night time, it's possible to see the sun under the sea beyond the render distance in Java Edition.
• 
  The sun rising in Java Edition Infdev

Mojang screenshots

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  The old round and square sun and moon textures
• 
  Noor and Kai relaxing beneath the sun

References