Starlight Mod for Minecraft rewrites the game’s entire lighting engine to fix lighting performance and errors. It was originally developed to be installed on servers that operate on a large scale with many players as they face performance problems because of the game’s slow light engine. However, it can also be installed on the client side.
Starlight Fabric & Forge’s latest versions are available for download. It doesn’t need to be installed on both the client and server side. However, ever since the release of Minecraft 1.20, Mojang has fixed the game’s lighting engine which has made this mod obsolete on the client side. On the server side, it still offers performance gain better than the vanilla light engine or other mods like Phosphor.
Note: This mod is incompatible with Phosphor, another popular mod that was built for the same reason and goals.
How to Download & Install Starlight Mod
Minecraft Starlight mod download and installation on the client side is a simple process, here’s how you can do it:
Note: You’ll need Minecraft Forge or Fabric Loader (if installing with Fabric, you’ll also need Fabric API) before you can install this mod.
Step 1: Download the mod’s jar file from this page.
Step 2: Move the downloaded jar file into the mods folder inside Minecraft, it can be found at: “Local Disk (C:) > Users > (Your PC Name) > AppData > Roaming > .minecraft > mods“.
Step 3: Now start the game via the Fabric/Forge (depending on which loader you installed the mod for) profile in Minecraft Launcher.
Minecraft Starlight vs Phosphor
Phosphor is a mod that performs the same function as the Starlight Minecraft mod. It is made by the popular dev jellysquid3, who created Sodium and Lithium, two of the most famous performance-enhancing Minecraft mods ever. This is the reason why Phosphor is so popular even though Starlight is leagues faster than it.
You might be thinking why not install both mods for the most optimal performance, this is not possible because they’re both incompatible with one another. On top of that, Starlight is also known to be incompatible with some mods so you’ll have to watch out for that.
Benchmarks of both the mods reveal that Minecraft Starlight is faster than Phorphor by a huge margin. In the test given below, you can see the difference between Vanilla Minecraft’s Light Engine and Phosphor isn’t much but comparing them with the Starlight mod shows how it overshadows them.
Another test below shows the time taken for the placement and removal of a simple glowstone. Here again, the difference isn’t much between Phosphor and vanilla Minecraft but Starlight blows them both out of the water.
