rivencraft/ports/mc263/RELEASE_NOTES_1.0.1.71-beta.1.md

Rivencraft 26.3 beta 1.0.1.71-beta.1

This beta collects the player-tested lighting and sky port slices since 1.0.1.65-beta.1. It is not yet feature-complete with Minecraft 1.21.1.

Lighting and seeded environments

• Added Normal, Dark, and Bright lighting pages with saved per-Age settings.
• Bright works in Cave terrain too, without adding skylight or weather.
• Bright supplies effective ambient light level 15 to native combined-light checks and the white ambient rendering attribute. Vanilla darkness-based monster checks respond to that lighting; there is no separate mob-spawn veto. Mobs that ignore light retain their normal rules.
• Missing weather and lighting controllers now resolve deterministically from the Age seed, using independent choices and Legacy-style Normal weighting. Explicit pages win; Cave terrain still forces weather Off. Existing Ages keep their saved choices rather than rerolling on load.

Sky styles

• Added Overworld, Nether, End, and animated Static Sky pages, independently of terrain, weather, and lighting. Choices persist on reload and restart.
• Nether Sky uses a reddish fog backdrop; End Sky uses the native End sky. These are visual styles, not Nether/End terrain or gameplay conversions: dimension geometry, coordinate scale, bed/water rules, and dragon behavior are not changed.
• Static Sky adapts the existing Legacy-style renderer: six independent 48×48 animated gray noise faces. A cached cube and small dynamic texture avoid rebuilding thousands of per-cell vertices each frame. Client-only rendering resources are released with the sky renderer.
• Non-Overworld backgrounds have transparent clouds and a derived day timeline that avoids Overworld sky/fog/cloud color tracks while retaining gameplay and illumination schedules.
• Updated supported-page feedback and added operator sky/environment probes.

Current limits and testing

• Missing Sky pages still default to Overworld; random sky selection, color pages and individual celestial bodies remain pending. Number-controlled Static Sky resolution is tracked separately in issue #109 for both versions.
• The writing/discovery loop, instability, portals, and optional-integration parity are still incomplete. Creative availability is not a support claim; check page tooltips and the beta guide for supported combinations.
• Previously generated chunks are not regenerated. Save compatibility during the beta is not guaranteed; keep backups and keep both version tracks apart.

The player reported in-game passes for the included slices, including Static Sky. Build checks passed for both version tracks. Targeted disposable-server checks covered environment defaults, explicit choices, registered sky/lighting variants, persistence and restart, including Cave + Bright and Static Sky. This is not a claim of complete dedicated-server or optional-mod coverage. Test servers were stopped and temporary worlds removed.

Requires Minecraft 26.3, NeoForge 26.3.0.99 and Java 25. Dynamic Dimensions and Bad Packets are not required by this build. The 1.21.1 release and its dependencies are unchanged.

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