MINECRAFTBIBLE
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Held items emit dynamic light that follows players AND mobs. Modern Paper 1.21+. No client mod required.
Held items emit dynamic light that follows players and mobs in real time. Built for modern Paper 1.21+. No client mod, no ProtocolLib, no world modification.
A torch in your hand lights up the cave around you. A jack-o-lantern on a zombie's head lights up the zombie. Drop a lantern on the floor and it lights up the room. Walk away and the world goes dark again — your save file never changes.
/dl reload reverts all phantom blocks, reloads config, resumes.| Feature | Status |
|---|---|
| Player held items (main hand, off hand) | ✅ |
| Player wearable lights (helmet slot) | ✅ |
| Mob held items (zombies, skeletons, piglins, etc.) | ✅ |
| Mob wearable lights (jack-o-lantern on a zombie's head) | ✅ |
| Dropped item lighting (lantern on the ground glows) | ✅ |
| Configurable item → brightness map | ✅ |
| Soft cluster falloff for smooth movement | ✅ |
Per-player toggle (/dl toggle) |
✅ |
| Per-world disable | ✅ |
| Underwater (waterlogged light blocks) | ✅ |
| No world modification — purely packet-based | ✅ |
| Spectator and vanish detection | ✅ |
| Hot reload | ✅ |
| Replaceable-block whitelist (preserves slabs, banners, etc.) | ✅ |
TORCH 14 LANTERN 15 GLOWSTONE 15 JACK_O_LANTERN 15
SOUL_TORCH 10 SOUL_LANTERN 10 REDSTONE_TORCH 7
SEA_LANTERN 15 SHROOMLIGHT 15 END_ROD 14
CAMPFIRE 14 SOUL_CAMPFIRE 10 GLOW_BERRIES 6 BLAZE_ROD 10
Add or override any material via config.yml.
| Command | Permission | Description |
|---|---|---|
/dynamiclights toggle |
dynamiclights.toggle |
Toggle dynamic lights for yourself. |
/dynamiclights reload |
dynamiclights.reload |
Reload config + resume. |
/dynamiclights status |
— | Diagnostics: tracked emitters, config summary. |
Aliases: /dl, /dynlights.
enabled: true
view_radius: 32
update_interval_ticks: 1
mob_scan_interval_ticks: 4
track_mobs: true
track_items: true # dropped items on the ground emit light
suppress_vanished_emitters: true
suppress_spectator_emitters: true
cluster_radius: 1 # 0 = single column, 1 = 3x3, 2 = 5x5 (capped at 2)
cluster_height: 2 # 1 = head only, 2 = head + body (capped at 3)
cluster_falloff_per_block: 2 # subtract per block of distance from center
disabled_worlds: [] # e.g. [world_nether, world_the_end]
mob_whitelist:
- ZOMBIE
- SKELETON
- PIGLIN
- DROWNED
equipment_slots:
- MAIN_HAND
- OFF_HAND
- HEAD
item_brightness:
TORCH: 14
LANTERN: 15
GLOWSTONE: 15
JACK_O_LANTERN: 15
replaceable_blocks: # only these blocks may be replaced with phantom light
- AIR
- CAVE_AIR
- WATER
- SHORT_GRASS
- TALL_GRASS
When an entity holds a configured light item, the plugin sends each nearby player a phantom minecraft:light[level=N,waterlogged=B] block-update packet at the entity's eye position (and surrounding cluster). The actual world is never touched — chunk lighting isn't recomputed and no blocks are placed. When the entity moves, the previous block(s) are reverted with a real-block packet and new ones are emitted.
Because the vanilla Minecraft client only knows about block-level lighting, dynamic lights inherently snap to the block grid. The cluster + falloff settings make the visual transitions softer but cannot make the light fully continuous — that requires a client-side mod such as LambDynamicLights or Optifine's Dynamic Lights.
On a 4-player test server with ~30 mobs holding torches, default cluster size (3×2×3 = 18 blocks per emitter), the per-tick task takes < 1 ms. If your server is CPU-bound:
track_mobs: false to skip the per-tick mob scan.cluster_radius to 0 (single column instead of 3×3).update_interval_ticks to 2 (light follows entity at 10 Hz instead of 20 Hz).DynamicLights-x.y.z.jar into your server's plugins/ folder.plugins/DynamicLights/config.yml to taste./dl reload.Proprietary — All Rights Reserved. You may install and run unmodified copies of the plugin on your own Minecraft servers. Redistribution, modification, and reverse engineering are not permitted without written permission.