Switching to Vanilla-Accurate Path Lighting for an Authentic Look

What the vanilla-accurate option does

The mod includes an option to reproduce the original game's path lighting behaviour rather than an approximation of it. The difference matters if you are building for screenshots, recreating an old world, or comparing against footage from before Sodium was installed. The vanilla-accurate mode follows the same rules the original renderer used, so the result should be indistinguishable from unmodded play.

Enabling and verifying it

1. Open the config and find the vanilla-accurate lighting toggle for path blocks.

2. Enable it. When this is on, the Shadowyness slider may have reduced or no effect on paths, because the vanilla behaviour is fixed rather than scaled — that is intended, not a bug.

3. Load a world you remember well from before Sodium, or generate a fresh one and find a village. Villages are the best test because their paths run in long connected lines with plenty of corners.

4. Compare a path corner against a full block beside it. In vanilla-accurate mode the shading should sit exactly where it did originally, with no extra darkening creeping onto neighbouring blocks.

5. If you also enabled the broader block scope, note that vanilla-accurate mode applies to paths specifically — other block types keep using the scaled behaviour.

Use this mode when fidelity matters and the scaled mode when you want control.