Starlight Mod (1.20.4, 1.20.1) – Ultimate Lighting Engine Optimization for Minecraft

Minecraft’s vanilla lighting engine has long been a bottleneck, especially on large-scale servers or during world generation. The Starlight Mod (1.20.4, 1.20.1) rewrites the lighting engine from the ground up to deliver massive performance gains and eliminate persistent lighting glitches. Whether you’re generating thousands of chunks, exploring cave systems, or running a heavily modded server, Starlight ensures lighting no longer drags down performance.

Compatible with both client and server environments, it’s a drop-in replacement for vanilla lighting optimized for speed, stability, and scalability.

Features:

The chart below illustrates the total time the light engine was active during the generation of 10,404 chunks, as measured using LightBench.

Test environment:
• World Seed: vanillakekw
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X

The graph below shows the duration of light updates triggered by breaking or placing a block on a large platform at Y = 254, extending down to another platform at Y = 0.

Test conditions:
• Benchmark tool: LightBench
• World setup: Flat world with bedrock at Y = 0 and grass at Y = 254
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X

The graph below displays light update times for a simple Glowstone placement and removal test.

Test conditions:
• Benchmark tool: LightBench
• World setup: Flat world with bedrock at Y = 0 and grass at Y = 254
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X