How to Get the Shadowy Path Effect Back After Installing Sodium

Why the effect disappears with Sodium

Sodium rewrites the lighting engine for performance, and in doing so it drops the soft directional shading that vanilla applies to non-full blocks like dirt paths. That shading is technically a rendering quirk, not a real light value, which is why Sodium treats it as disposable. This mod restores it as a separate rendering pass on top of Sodium, so you keep the framerate gains and get the visual depth back.

Getting it working

1. Make sure Sodium is installed and loading normally — this mod is an addon, so it does nothing on its own.

2. Install the mod alongside Sodium and launch the game once so its config file is generated.

3. Open the mod's config screen. You can reach it from the Mods list in the pause menu, or through the config button on the title screen if your mod loader provides one.

4. Find the master toggle for the shadow effect and turn it on. If paths still look flat, this is almost always the setting that is off.

5. Walk over a dirt path in daylight and look at the edge where it meets a full block. The shadow should now hug the inner rim of the path rather than the surface reading as uniformly lit.

If nothing changes, confirm you are looking at actual path blocks and not a full block with a path-like texture from a resource pack — the effect only applies to the block shapes the mod targets.