Absolute Realistic Door Light

Version 1.0.1 is now available. This update fixes the known compatibility cases where lighting or rendering mods could restore vanilla light around closed doors. Single and double doors now remain consistently dark across both halves and along their surrounding edges, while windowed doors still allow the intended faint glow.

Out now: Version 1.0.1 — close the door, keep the dark Version 1.0.1 makes door lighting more reliable across modded installations. Closed single and double doors now maintain a clean, consistent shadow without bright spots appearing along the frame, ceiling or floor.

• Fixed the remaining light leaks around single and double doors
• Corrected lighting along upper, lower and side edges
• Improved compatibility with Emberbium, Cheap Lighting and Lumenite
• Prevented other light-engine changes from restoring vanilla door lighting
• Preserved normal exterior lighting and the faint glow through door windows
• Available for every supported Minecraft version and mod loader No shaders required. Close the door, and the room behind it stays dark.

In vanilla Minecraft a closed door is invisible to light: a lantern outside lights up the room behind it as if the door were open. Absolute Realistic Door Light fixes that. Closed doors, trapdoors, curtains and shutters now block light – with Minecraft's real light values, without shaders.

The same room, three lanterns hanging outside, every door closed. Left: vanilla. Right: with Absolute Realistic Door Light.

How it works

Minecraft stores one light value per block and lets it spread from block to block. In vanilla, doors and trapdoors are see-through for that light, so closing them changes nothing.

1. Real light, not a filter. The mod changes how much light a closed door, trapdoor, curtain or shutter lets through – the same value the game uses to spread light and to decide where mobs can spawn. Closed: none. A door half with a window: almost none (a lantern right in front leaves light level 2 behind it). Open: everything, exactly like vanilla.
2. Windows are found automatically. Vanilla doors use a profile checked against every original texture. For doors from other mods the server reads the door's own block model and texture, follows the model inheritance, looks only at the texture pixels that are really used and decides for each door half whether there is a real window – a hole you can see through, not a notch in the frame. The result is sent to every player, so a resource pack on one client cannot change what the server decided.
3. Clean edges. A door leaf is only 3 pixels thick, but Minecraft lights the whole block as one. The mod draws the open part of the door block with the light of the side it is open to, and smooth lighting never blends light across the leaf. The recess on the lantern side stays bright, the room behind stays dark – no glowing door frames.
4. Existing worlds are repaired. Light saved before the mod was installed is recalculated around doors as chunks load, and again after a datapack /reload. Nothing has to be rebuilt.

Features

• Closed doors and trapdoors stop block light and sky light. Open them by hand or by redstone and the light comes back immediately.
• Both halves of a door are handled separately:
  • Oak, iron, jungle, bamboo, copper and poplar doors: window in the upper half only.
  • Acacia and cherry doors: see-through parts in both halves.
  • Spruce, birch, dark oak, mangrove, crimson, warped and pale oak doors: fully light-tight.
  • Trapdoors: spruce, birch, dark oak and pale oak are light-tight, all others (including copper and poplar) let the faint glow through.
• Doors and trapdoors from other mods work automatically. Tested with Macaw's Doors.
• Another Furniture (optional): all 27 curtains and shutters block light when closed and keep their original click, redstone and connection behaviour.
• For pack makers: datapack block tags mark doors as windowed (windowed, windowed_upper, windowed_lower), force them light-tight (opaque), add other blocks with an open state (extra_barriers) or restore vanilla behaviour (excluded).

No shaders, no configuration, no new blocks.

Requirements and compatibility

Supported release targets:

• Minecraft 26.3: Fabric and NeoForge
• Minecraft 26.2: Fabric and NeoForge
• Minecraft 26.1 / 26.1.2: Fabric and NeoForge
• Minecraft 1.21.1: Fabric, NeoForge and Forge
• Minecraft 1.20.1: Fabric and Forge

Fabric builds need Fabric API. Install the mod on the server and on every client. Optional, tested on Forge 1.20.1: Another Furniture 3.0.4 and Macaw's Doors 1.1.5.

Good to know

• The mod changes Minecraft’s real light values, not just the rendered image. Rooms behind closed doors are genuinely dark, which can also affect light-dependent mechanics such as mob spawning.
• Minecraft stores light per block. A window therefore allows a faint glow through the entire door half rather than projecting the exact shape of the window.
• Version 1.0.1 includes targeted compatibility improvements for Emberbium, Cheap Lighting and Lumenite.
• The door-recess correction is tested with Minecraft’s vanilla renderer, NeoForge’s smooth lighting and Fabric’s Indigo renderer.
• Sodium, Embeddium, Rubidium, Iris, Oculus, Starlight and shader packs have not yet been fully validated. Core light blocking may still work, but renderer-specific visual results can differ.
• Doors using fully custom renderers or unsupported model loaders safely fall back to being light-tight while closed.

License

All Rights Reserved.