Rendering experiment · In development
Salt’s Lighting
An experimental rework of Minecraft’s lighting system.
Overview
A Java project exploring changes to Minecraft lighting, including diagonal light propagation, precise light values, and persistent chunk caching. The diagram below describes the implementation; it does not show an in-game result.
Block-light pipeline
Block changes and light sources feed queues for checks, decreases, and increases, with a configurable per-run limit. Light propagates through 26 neighboring positions, using axial and diagonal distances, opacity, and shadow penalties. Precise light values use a scale of 1024 and retain source vectors per block.
Storage
Precise values are rounded back to Minecraft’s 0–15 light levels. Light and source sections are serialized into a persistent chunk cache and restored when valid cached data is available.
Screenshots & artwork
