Starlight Mod

Discover a new guide for Starlight Mod Wiki. This mod rewrites light engine to fix lighting performance and lighting bugs for Minecraft. You can be installed on a dedicated server or client. It is not required to be installed on both sides. If you have Starlight on the server, the client can use vanilla/Starlight to connect. If you have Starlight on the client, similarly you can connect to the vanilla/Starlight server.

Contents

This was developed for higher scale dedicated servers, as they suffered from performance issues due to the light engine being too slow. The only solution is to create an extremely invasive mod that rewrites the entire light engine.

Mod type:

Miscellaneous

Starlight Mod Featured:

The graph below shows how long the light engine took while generating 10404 blocks:

Tested via LightBench.
World seed: vanikekw.
CPU:Ryzen 9 5950X.

Here is a graph detailing how long it takes light update to break/place a block on the big platform at y=254 down to the big platform at y=0:

Tested via LightBench.
The world is just a flat world with rock at y=0 and grass at y=254.
CPU:Ryzen 9 5950X.

Here is a detailed graph of light update times for a simple glowstone location/break:

Tested via LightBench.
The world is just a flat world with rock at y=0 and grass at y=254.
CPU:Ryzen 9 5950X.

Update History

Minecraft 1.20 Light Engine Changer

Please see: https://gist.github.com/Spottedleaf/6cc1acdd03a9b7ac34699bf5e8f1b85c TL; DR Mojang improved their own light engines using similar performance-critical designs from Starlight. As a result, they closed the performance gap, making Starlight obsolete on the client side.

Compatibility

Mod can be installed on a dedicated server or client.

It is not required to be installed on both sides.

Clients can use Vanilla/Phosphor/Starlight to connect if you have Starlight on the server. Similarly, if you have Starlight on the client, you can connect to the vanilla/Phosphor/Starlight server.

They are completely incompatible as Starlight cannot be installed with Phosphor. Browsing through Starlight’s Issue Tracker will further reveal mod incompatibilities. Starlight is a pretty destructive rewritten light engine, so it will break mods more often.

Purpose

This mod was developed for higher scale dedicated servers, as they suffered from performance issues due to the light engine being too slow. The only solution is to create an extremely invasive mod that rewrites the entire light engine. The developer moved the mod to canvas so they could update it during the snapshot and decided that it would be beneficial to publish it to all users, especially guest users.

However, it has the disadvantage of being an invasive mod: Invasion does not affect higher-scale servers because they run on Bukkit.

Performance for 1.20:

Here are a few charts showing performance in these two areas:

High y-level block editing
Update normal block light:

The lightweight engine time-blocking graph has been removed as a benchmark because it is not valid for 1.20. Starlight and vanilla are close enough at 1.20 so this test is useless as well. Update block in height graph Simple glow block update