Waylight

Playing Wynncraft¹ with shaders² on is great for immersion, but a lot of areas end up being way too dark to actually see where you're going. On a server like this you can’t really use normal Minecraft items, so carrying a torch or a lantern isn’t an option, and I wanted something that ran entirely on my side but still felt natural, which is how I ended up with a lantern on my belt.

That also shaped most of what Waylight does. It’s a client-side Fabric mod, so it works on any server and never touches the actual gameplay, and the lantern doesn’t need an item in your inventory at all. It can hang on either hip or sit in your left hand, can turn itself on when things get dark and off again once they don’t, and goes out underwater, which all came from wanting it to behave like something you’d actually carry around.

Light that comes from the lantern

The lantern uses Minecraft’s own lantern and soul lantern models, so a texture pack changes it along with everything else, which helps the immersion even more. The light comes from LambDynamicLights, which already handles light that moves around with the player, except that here it’s attached to the lantern itself, so when the lantern swings on your hip, the light swings with it.

Getting it to swing

Getting the lantern to move realistically was the hardest part by far. It swings like a pendulum, picking up speed with you, lagging a little behind when you turn, and reacting differently to sprinting, jumping, landing and crouching, and it took a lot of iterations to find a mix where the motion stays visible without being too much across all the different places you can be and things you can be doing.

First person needed its own tuning too. On your hip the lantern is hidden by default in first person while its light stays on, and in your hand it moves more gently than it does in third person, though you can switch the hand to stay still or turn the overall motion anywhere from a quarter of the default up to double.

Where it’s at

I released it in March 2026 without promoting it at all, and it’s been downloaded 6.7k times across Modrinth and CurseForge since, which honestly surprised me (this number is up to date as of today, woah technology!). The feedback has been incredibly positive, and I’ve even seen a few videos from people genuinely recommending it, which made me really happy. It's still actively being developed, and you can try it yourself on Modrinth and CurseForge.