A real flashlight for Minecraft. Smooth beam, honest shadows, blinding glare.
Every flashlight mod does the same trick: invisible light blocks chasing your crosshair, chunky relights, light leaking through walls. Flashlight doesn't. It ships its own shader-driven light engine — a smooth volumetric cone that updates every frame, stops at walls, casts soft shadows and blinds anyone who looks into the lens. Built as the companion to Enhanced Darkness: in its pitch black you'll need one.
| 🔦 Flashlight | 💡 Work Lantern | |
|---|---|---|
| Role | cheap all-rounder | expensive floodlight |
| Beam | scroll to focus the lens: wide 25-block flood ↔ razor-thin 110-block spot | fixed ~40° wall of light, 55 blocks |
| Power | AA battery — 30 min | battery pack — 45 min |
| Recipe | iron + redstone + glass | gold, iron, redstone block |
| Loot | villages (+ AA batteries) | dungeons, mineshafts, strongholds (+ battery packs) |
- Right-click — on/off. R — slam a fresh battery in, gun-reload style, with a chest-pull animation.
- Mouse wheel (flashlight on, either hand) — zoom the lens: floodlight for corridors, sniper beam for scouting.
- Batteries are consumables. Below 20% charge the beam visibly dies — reload or walk in the dark.
- 🥽 Night Vision Goggles — worn on the head, toggled with G. A real image-intensifier tube: ~3 s warm-up synced to the power-on sound, film grain, scanlines, and honest overexposure — daylight, torches or a flashlight beam burn out to pale green per-pixel. Runs 30 min on an AA battery, hot-swapped with the same key. Craft-only — no loot.
- 🧨 Signal Flare — hold right-click to wind up, release to throw in an arc (~35 blocks). Lands, burns for 60 s with a flickering red point light from the same engine and a column of red smoke. Single-use, can't be extinguished.
- 🔊 Sounds — flashlight click, lens zoom, NVG on/off whine, the low hum of a running work lantern. Subtitled (en/ru).
No light blocks. No chunk relights. The cone is computed inside the game's core shaders — terrain, entities, dropped items, particles and even vanilla mob shadow blobs are cloned on the fly with the beam math injected. That means:
- Instant — the light moves the frame you move, with a subtle hand-lag inertia like a real torch.
- Honest — light is
albedo × cone: real textures, real colours, zero noise, works in absolute darkness. - Blocked by walls — a 48³ voxel map around the camera is ray-marched (DDA) per pixel, rescanning only blocks that actually changed. Soft penumbra from a five-ray lens disk (dropping to one ray past ~25 blocks, where the penumbra is subpixel anyway), entities cast sharp capsule-silhouette shadows with PCSS edges, and the beam dissolves vanilla shadow circles it hits.
- Multiplayer-native — up to 32 sources at once, capped at 4 per chunk so a crowd in one spot never starves light elsewhere; everyone sees everyone's light, zoom level included.
- Blinding — glare is physics, not a sprite: its strength equals the actual cone intensity at your eyes, traced past blocks and mobs. Look into a lens up close and the screen whites out.
- Sodium-ready — with Sodium installed the beam is injected straight into its terrain shaders. Same light, same shadows, Sodium speed.
- Install Fabric Loader for Minecraft 26.1.x.
- Install Fabric API.
- Run Java 25.
- Drop the jar into
mods— on the client and the server (items and batteries are real). - Pairs best with Enhanced Darkness.
⚠️ Iris shaderpacks replace the game's shaders entirely — with a pack enabled the beam won't light terrain. Sodium alone works out of the box.
./gradlew build # jar lands in build/libs
./gradlew runClient # dev clientMIT