Many people use torches at the beginning to light up caves, or use light to prevent hostile mobs from spawning. But there are two problems:
1) Already experienced players, instead of spending resources, simply increase the screen brightness, which is why torches are not needed for this.
2) Even if it is not convenient to play at maximum brightness, then people use OptiFine, which is easily downloaded.
Then the question arises - why can't we make such a function so that the torch glows in the hand? If my memory does not lie, it seems that in the trailer 1.17, you can see that Alex takes a torch to light his way. Please add this function in the new snapshot. Please add this function in the new snapshot🙏
The first needs to be fixed - ever been in a dark cave in real life? For example, a cave I recently explored (in my own idealized modded version) - no amount of screen brightness will enable you to see anything, and any players that do this are far, far from "experienced":
Another example that shows what would happen if you could increase gamma - nope, still ain't seeing anything in complete darkness (I patched this exploit before Mojang did), also, isn't it just weird to see glowing fog and the sky in unloaded chunks when underground? No idea why Mojang never fixed them:
0% brightness:
100% brightness (Bright, which only has the effect, to me anyway, of increasing the area that is well-lit from around 2-3 to 6-8 blocks around the lava, as well as giving a much smoother gradient, both of which are why I've always used it and even have the game default to it; when caving I place new torches in blocks with a light level of 2-3, the point where it becomes too hard to see, which coincidentally results in a minimum of 8-9 between torches, so enough to stop mobs from spawning in older versions (thus IMO the change so they only spawn in total darkness was pointless):
1000% brightness (only blocks with a light level of 1 or more are visible):
Night Vision (note that even the fog and sky are totally black in the previous examples):
Why do Night Vision potions even exist?! Maybe they need to last a lot longer or be easier to make so people actually use them, but Mojang clearly doesn't want you to just be able to use them anytime (my caving trips last for multiple 3+ hour long play sessions between trips back to empty my inventory/ender chest, of course, shulker boxes would make carrying so many potions a non-issue, and you can always bring a brewing stand and ingredients, then again, very few players spend so much time caving, especially at a stretch).
Also, Mojang has stated that they will never add any form of "dynamic lighting", citing its impact on gameplay (in other words, they want you to have to place torches to see, then again, the fact they refuse to make caves actually dark seems to contradict this, they did at least patch the gamma exploit so you can't get "Night Vision" levels of brightness anymore):
Torch/light in your hand has been evaluated for its impact on gameplay and rejected. (September 2019)
"Miner hats are too modern, sadly." (reference) (August 2018)
if they didn't make caves 100% dark (i can still see in caves even when my game brightness is set as low as possible) it was probably intended... or mojang is just stupid
I can sort of see why Mojang wouldn't want lighting being emitted from held light sources as native behavior. Some things are better off left as mods as opposed to being implemented into the vanilla game, and I feel like this is one of those things.
You can only prevent the first one by having the game render a lack of any in-game light as pure Black, which it currently doesn't do. Even if that was made to be the case though, that would only prevent this in caves and not on the surface at night. While there is a very low light level on the surface at night from the moon, that "shouldn't" (quoted for a reason) be able to result in a brightness that can nearly match the visibility of day.
The option most likely exists as an accessibility option first as foremost.
1. Many displays don't properly produce darker shades/scene.
2. Ambient environments (real life ones) may reducing visibility of the light that the display is producing. A brighter display is needed to counteract a brighter environment or else visibility is impacted, especially in darker shades. Having a software and hardware slider is typically seen better than having only one.
Maybe there's also some design choice reasons to why it as well; like maybe Mojang want to leave it to the player to decide if they can or can't see in caves and at night. I can only guess at that one, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is part of it too. Some games will abandon realism for gameplay or simply ease of accessibility if it makes it more fun/enjoyable to a wider possible audience.
The first needs to be fixed - ever been in a dark cave in real life?
Unless the current behavior is one that Mojang is unaware of and is behavior that is not intended, then it's probably an intentional design choice. After all, it's been that way since very, very early on in the game's life and has been left unchanged that entire time, so I have to imagine it's intended for some reason(s) and not anything they see as needing "fixed".
Besides, is realism isn't the best reasoning here? Minecraft already makes a lot of design choices where it abandons realism for gameplay reasons.
If you're going for realism even on just visibility, it's also very dark (if not often pitch Black) outside at night where no light is nearby in real life. Moon light does not grant anywhere near the amount of visibility that can be had in game.
I would say that the not-so-dark caves are intentional, yes. It makes the game less scary to younger audiences. I always played at lowest brightness as a kid and found it very unpleasant to be in caves.
I would say that the not-so-dark caves are intentional, yes. It makes the game less scary to younger audiences. I always played at lowest brightness as a kid and found it very unpleasant to be in caves.
The main reason for the lack of complete darkness appears to be the way the game calculates light levels; it initializes a table with the following values:
This does give 0 as the minimum but the code that generates the lightmap includes the following lines, which scales the separate RGB components to 0.03-0.99, this it can never reach zero (my first modification to make complete darkness removed these lines of code, or changed them to only multiply by 0.99, giving the same maximum, which is actually a bit less than full brightness). This code is also run twice so the effects stack, giving a min-max range of 0.588 to 0.9804 for an input range of 0 to 1 (the Wiki says that on Moody complete darkness is 5% of full screen brightness while full brightness is 98%):
Also, why do they use such an aggressive curve (a light level of 12 is already half-brightness? I greatly prefer Bright, which makes the curve more linear, not just because it makes torches much more effective (besides just being brighter at lower levels block light levels 13-15 are visually identical, even on Moody 14 and 15 are the same, while sky light follows a curve more like the original values) but because the gradient looks a lot smoother (at least to me), even the color is different:
These are slightly modified from vanilla, besides explicitly setting the (0,0) point to black I also rescaled levels 1-14 so 1 is slightly darker for a smaller step down to 0, with the effect scaled with gamma (so Moody, left, only differs in the 0,0 point), I also fixed a bug where the transition from a light level of 0-1 is not smooth, which Mojang has still not fixed, or various other issues with smooth lighting.
Also, the light table was in fact different in Beta, with a minimum of 0.05, the game simply directly used these values as there was no lightmap (modern lightmap-based lighting was implemented in Beta 1.8, this is also why day-night transitions used to require chunk updates as the game was changing the color values of blocks to change their brightness, not a lightmap texture which can be updated separately, this is also why the Intel rendering bug doesn't affect older versions as it is due to how the game switched between texture units, one for the "normal" textures and one for the lightmap):
I would say that the not-so-dark caves are intentional, yes. It makes the game less scary to younger audiences. I always played at lowest brightness as a kid and found it very unpleasant to be in caves.
It's most surely intentional, yes, because it's been this way for a very long time, and by a very long time, that might mean as long as the game has existed. While it's changed between the start and now, the "minimal visibility in no light conditions is still some degree of viability" behavior seems to have always been true, and the current way seems to have been implemented as far back as 2009 or 2010, and largely unchanged since.
I tried Alpha 1.2.6 and it resembles current versions in this regard, and that was in December of 2010, so the current behavior goes back at least that far (perhaps changed with the introduction on Infdev?). I tried a version of Indev from August of 2010 but I was met with a Black screen (not my entire screen but just the game window) after a second or two of loading into a world, so I couldn't test it. The earliest version (one of the "cave game" versions?) works, but it definitely has differences here, but even in that version, a lack of light wasn't Black (in fact, the difference was that it was even more visible than it is now).
As for the exact reasons why it's this way, I can only guess, but it's most likely one or a combination of accessibility reasons and wanting to allow the player the choice to choose their minimum visibility. Which is fine... except we lack the option to choose to have no light conditions result in no visibility regardless of brightness. Maybe there's some reason(s) for why Notch chose this enforced visible minimum value (and/or why Mojang sticks with it), but I don't know if the reason has ever been stated.
if they didn't make caves 100% dark (i can still see in caves even when my game brightness is set as low as possible) it was probably intended... or mojang is just stupid
Well I don't, especially when so many people post what look like black rectangles (or almost black, dark enough anyway that it is very hard to see what they are supposedly showing without enhancing the image), especially when showcasing something they made (for whatever reason Alpha/Beta players in particular love showing things at night, which was much darker than today). The reduced range of pixel values also reduces the quality and induces artifacts, e.g. in this thread (the weird "circles" were due to the "vignette" effect around the edges of the screen (another feature I dislike and removed from Fancy), which normally has a smooth gradient but at lower light levels less and less of the 0-255 range is being used so the steps stand out).
Also, the developer of Optifine claimed that if you can easily see in the dark (even just night in Alpha/Beta, not a dark cave) then your monitor isn't calibrated properly, or perhaps your room is too dark* (it should be bright enough so a white screen looks natural, not "Discord light mode"):
On a good calibrated monitor which can show near-black colors the Minecraft night scenes are almost fully black (light level 4). On the other hand, not so good monitors which have problems with near black colors show the night scenes very good.
*The recommended lighting for a computer room, the higher level for LCD displays is presumably so darker areas actually look dark due to a poorer black level (I presume OLED (not "LED" as many monitors claim to be, that just refers to the backlight technology) would be similar to CRT):
Generally, for paper tasks and offices with CRT displays, office lighting should range between 20 to 50 foot-candles. If LCD monitors are in use, higher levels of light are usually needed for the same viewing tasks (up to 73 foot-candles).
(as seen in this thread and the discussion here (2013!) this issue has bugged me for a long time, nothing is more of a turn-off than a video where somebody decided to go caving and doesn't use any light sources or Night Vision, you certainly won't see this in any gameplay for my mod, torches galore (mob spawning is also much more aggressive so they are more essential, and even if they only spawned in complete darkness, like since 1.18 (and I actually have a gamerule for this), you'll still be lighting up the area pretty well since if you place a torch in the first block at 0 the minimum between them will be 7, almost enough to stop mobs from spawning in older versions, or greatly reduce the probability)
Many people use torches at the beginning to light up caves, or use light to prevent hostile mobs from spawning. But there are two problems:
1) Already experienced players, instead of spending resources, simply increase the screen brightness, which is why torches are not needed for this.
2) Even if it is not convenient to play at maximum brightness, then people use OptiFine, which is easily downloaded.
Then the question arises - why can't we make such a function so that the torch glows in the hand? If my memory does not lie, it seems that in the trailer 1.17, you can see that Alex takes a torch to light his way. Please add this function in the new snapshot. Please add this function in the new snapshot🙏
The first needs to be fixed - ever been in a dark cave in real life? For example, a cave I recently explored (in my own idealized modded version) - no amount of screen brightness will enable you to see anything, and any players that do this are far, far from "experienced":
Another example that shows what would happen if you could increase gamma - nope, still ain't seeing anything in complete darkness (I patched this exploit before Mojang did), also, isn't it just weird to see glowing fog and the sky in unloaded chunks when underground? No idea why Mojang never fixed them:
100% brightness (Bright, which only has the effect, to me anyway, of increasing the area that is well-lit from around 2-3 to 6-8 blocks around the lava, as well as giving a much smoother gradient, both of which are why I've always used it and even have the game default to it; when caving I place new torches in blocks with a light level of 2-3, the point where it becomes too hard to see, which coincidentally results in a minimum of 8-9 between torches, so enough to stop mobs from spawning in older versions (thus IMO the change so they only spawn in total darkness was pointless):
1000% brightness (only blocks with a light level of 1 or more are visible):
Night Vision (note that even the fog and sky are totally black in the previous examples):
Why do Night Vision potions even exist?! Maybe they need to last a lot longer or be easier to make so people actually use them, but Mojang clearly doesn't want you to just be able to use them anytime (my caving trips last for multiple 3+ hour long play sessions between trips back to empty my inventory/ender chest, of course, shulker boxes would make carrying so many potions a non-issue, and you can always bring a brewing stand and ingredients, then again, very few players spend so much time caving, especially at a stretch).
Also, Mojang has stated that they will never add any form of "dynamic lighting", citing its impact on gameplay (in other words, they want you to have to place torches to see, then again, the fact they refuse to make caves actually dark seems to contradict this, they did at least patch the gamma exploit so you can't get "Night Vision" levels of brightness anymore):
(you could make a point that these are 5-6 years old, even the page hasn't been updated in nearly 5 years)
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
if they didn't make caves 100% dark (i can still see in caves even when my game brightness is set as low as possible) it was probably intended... or mojang is just stupid
I can sort of see why Mojang wouldn't want lighting being emitted from held light sources as native behavior. Some things are better off left as mods as opposed to being implemented into the vanilla game, and I feel like this is one of those things.
You can only prevent the first one by having the game render a lack of any in-game light as pure Black, which it currently doesn't do. Even if that was made to be the case though, that would only prevent this in caves and not on the surface at night. While there is a very low light level on the surface at night from the moon, that "shouldn't" (quoted for a reason) be able to result in a brightness that can nearly match the visibility of day.
The option most likely exists as an accessibility option first as foremost.
1. Many displays don't properly produce darker shades/scene.
2. Ambient environments (real life ones) may reducing visibility of the light that the display is producing. A brighter display is needed to counteract a brighter environment or else visibility is impacted, especially in darker shades. Having a software and hardware slider is typically seen better than having only one.
Maybe there's also some design choice reasons to why it as well; like maybe Mojang want to leave it to the player to decide if they can or can't see in caves and at night. I can only guess at that one, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is part of it too. Some games will abandon realism for gameplay or simply ease of accessibility if it makes it more fun/enjoyable to a wider possible audience.
Unless the current behavior is one that Mojang is unaware of and is behavior that is not intended, then it's probably an intentional design choice. After all, it's been that way since very, very early on in the game's life and has been left unchanged that entire time, so I have to imagine it's intended for some reason(s) and not anything they see as needing "fixed".
Besides, is realism isn't the best reasoning here? Minecraft already makes a lot of design choices where it abandons realism for gameplay reasons.
If you're going for realism even on just visibility, it's also very dark (if not often pitch Black) outside at night where no light is nearby in real life. Moon light does not grant anywhere near the amount of visibility that can be had in game.
I would say that the not-so-dark caves are intentional, yes. It makes the game less scary to younger audiences. I always played at lowest brightness as a kid and found it very unpleasant to be in caves.
The main reason for the lack of complete darkness appears to be the way the game calculates light levels; it initializes a table with the following values:
protected void generateLightBrightnessTable() { for (int var2 = 0; var2 <= 15; ++var2) { float var3 = 1.0F - (float)var2 / 15.0F; this.lightBrightnessTable[var2] = (1.0F - var3) / (var3 * 3.0F + 1.0F); } } Light 0: 0.0 Light 1: 0.017543858 Light 2: 0.037037037 Light 3: 0.058823526 Light 4: 0.08333333 Light 5: 0.11111113 Light 6: 0.14285712 Light 7: 0.1794872 Light 8: 0.22222225 Light 9: 0.2727273 Light 10: 0.33333334 Light 11: 0.40740743 Light 12: 0.50000006 Light 13: 0.61904764 Light 14: 0.77777773 Light 15: 1.0This does give 0 as the minimum but the code that generates the lightmap includes the following lines, which scales the separate RGB components to 0.03-0.99, this it can never reach zero (my first modification to make complete darkness removed these lines of code, or changed them to only multiply by 0.99, giving the same maximum, which is actually a bit less than full brightness). This code is also run twice so the effects stack, giving a min-max range of 0.588 to 0.9804 for an input range of 0 to 1 (the Wiki says that on Moody complete darkness is 5% of full screen brightness while full brightness is 98%):
Also, why do they use such an aggressive curve (a light level of 12 is already half-brightness? I greatly prefer Bright, which makes the curve more linear, not just because it makes torches much more effective (besides just being brighter at lower levels block light levels 13-15 are visually identical, even on Moody 14 and 15 are the same, while sky light follows a curve more like the original values) but because the gradient looks a lot smoother (at least to me), even the color is different:
These are slightly modified from vanilla, besides explicitly setting the (0,0) point to black I also rescaled levels 1-14 so 1 is slightly darker for a smaller step down to 0, with the effect scaled with gamma (so Moody, left, only differs in the 0,0 point), I also fixed a bug where the transition from a light level of 0-1 is not smooth, which Mojang has still not fixed, or various other issues with smooth lighting.
Also, the light table was in fact different in Beta, with a minimum of 0.05, the game simply directly used these values as there was no lightmap (modern lightmap-based lighting was implemented in Beta 1.8, this is also why day-night transitions used to require chunk updates as the game was changing the color values of blocks to change their brightness, not a lightmap texture which can be updated separately, this is also why the Intel rendering bug doesn't affect older versions as it is due to how the game switched between texture units, one for the "normal" textures and one for the lightmap):
protected void b() { for (int i = 0; i <= 15; i++) { float f2 = 1.0F - (float) i / 15F; f[i] = ((1.0F - f2) / (f2 * 3F + 1.0F)) * 0.95F + 0.05F; } } Light 0: 0.05 Light 1: 0.06666666 Light 2: 0.085185185 Light 3: 0.10588235 Light 4: 0.12916666 Light 5: 0.15555558 Light 6: 0.18571426 Light 7: 0.22051284 Light 8: 0.26111114 Light 9: 0.30909094 Light 10: 0.36666667 Light 11: 0.43703708 Light 12: 0.52500004 Light 13: 0.63809526 Light 14: 0.7888889 Light 15: 1.0TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
It's most surely intentional, yes, because it's been this way for a very long time, and by a very long time, that might mean as long as the game has existed. While it's changed between the start and now, the "minimal visibility in no light conditions is still some degree of viability" behavior seems to have always been true, and the current way seems to have been implemented as far back as 2009 or 2010, and largely unchanged since.
I tried Alpha 1.2.6 and it resembles current versions in this regard, and that was in December of 2010, so the current behavior goes back at least that far (perhaps changed with the introduction on Infdev?). I tried a version of Indev from August of 2010 but I was met with a Black screen (not my entire screen but just the game window) after a second or two of loading into a world, so I couldn't test it. The earliest version (one of the "cave game" versions?) works, but it definitely has differences here, but even in that version, a lack of light wasn't Black (in fact, the difference was that it was even more visible than it is now).
As for the exact reasons why it's this way, I can only guess, but it's most likely one or a combination of accessibility reasons and wanting to allow the player the choice to choose their minimum visibility. Which is fine... except we lack the option to choose to have no light conditions result in no visibility regardless of brightness. Maybe there's some reason(s) for why Notch chose this enforced visible minimum value (and/or why Mojang sticks with it), but I don't know if the reason has ever been stated.
Torches emitting light is probably too dynamic or realistic as then players would probably want other light blocks to give off light when in hand.
I like that function
Well I don't, especially when so many people post what look like black rectangles (or almost black, dark enough anyway that it is very hard to see what they are supposedly showing without enhancing the image), especially when showcasing something they made (for whatever reason Alpha/Beta players in particular love showing things at night, which was much darker than today). The reduced range of pixel values also reduces the quality and induces artifacts, e.g. in this thread (the weird "circles" were due to the "vignette" effect around the edges of the screen (another feature I dislike and removed from Fancy), which normally has a smooth gradient but at lower light levels less and less of the 0-255 range is being used so the steps stand out).
Also, the developer of Optifine claimed that if you can easily see in the dark (even just night in Alpha/Beta, not a dark cave) then your monitor isn't calibrated properly, or perhaps your room is too dark* (it should be bright enough so a white screen looks natural, not "Discord light mode"):
*The recommended lighting for a computer room, the higher level for LCD displays is presumably so darker areas actually look dark due to a poorer black level (I presume OLED (not "LED" as many monitors claim to be, that just refers to the backlight technology) would be similar to CRT):
(as seen in this thread and the discussion here (2013!) this issue has bugged me for a long time, nothing is more of a turn-off than a video where somebody decided to go caving and doesn't use any light sources or Night Vision, you certainly won't see this in any gameplay for my mod, torches galore (mob spawning is also much more aggressive so they are more essential, and even if they only spawned in complete darkness, like since 1.18 (and I actually have a gamerule for this), you'll still be lighting up the area pretty well since if you place a torch in the first block at 0 the minimum between them will be 7, almost enough to stop mobs from spawning in older versions, or greatly reduce the probability)
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?