1. Mini Dynamic Lights

A fast dynamic light mod by doing minimal computation through:

selective dynamic light entity computation by type and count
smaller range of dynamic light radius

As a result, the dynamic lighting can appear choppy in expense of performance. However, dynamic lighting settings (Section 4.) can be tweaked to fit into your system.

2. Acknowledgement

Thanks to this source for giving me the best reference for me to get started on this mod.

LambDynamicLights - How does it work?

3. Features

I present to you five basic features to this mini dynamic lights mod.

3.1. Nearest Entities Dynamic Lights

By default, the mod will only render the nearest 4 entities that are eligible for dynamic lights, which is the lowest setting for this mod.

[Nearest Entities Rendering: https://imgur.com/G9ptG41.mp4]

If you are interested to increase the settings, head to the video settings of your option screen.

Glowing item entities will not produce dynamic lights until it reaches the ground to reduce dynamic lights calculations.

3.2. Animation

When you hold a glowing item, it will glow gradually like this.

[Animation: https://imgur.com/3jv4cbt.mp4]

It's the little things that count. :)

3.3. Vision-based Lighting

The default player light is a bit in front of the player to create an illusion that the glowing item is being held in front of the player.

[Vision-based Lighting: https://imgur.com/ivyQ0Ga.mp4]

3.4. (Experimental) Entity Configurable

This mod only preconfigured dynamic lights to players and glow squids, but you can extend the configuration to your likings!

In your game directory, find the directory config and create a directory named dynamic-lights. In there, create new files in the format filename.yaml and the mod will iterate over each file to apply your new configuration.

This is a configuration template for entities

# a compulsory field
type: entity
# or
type: item

# minecraft id for the entity/item
id: minecraft:player

# light level when entity is not on fire or has enchanted items
# default is 0
default light level: 0

# light level when entity has enchanted items
# default is 5
enchantment light level: 5

# light level when entity is on fire
# default is 5
fire light level: 12

There will be more configurations in the future, but these are the current ones so far.

4. Settings

A lot of the settings here are experimental, you can usually leave it as it is. However, if you are interested in getting higher dynamic light resolution, you can refer to the following options in the Video Settings page:

4.1. Chunk Builder

Set this option to Full Blocking to ensure all lighting animation to be in-sync. This will usually fix all choppy-ness issues but will also reduce performances.

4.2. Smooth Lighting

Set this option to Minimum to reduce light smoothness and increase performance.

4.3. Dynamic Lights (FAST / FANCY)

Option FAST will produce slightly choppy lights with greater performance. Option FANCY will produce smoother lights with lesser performance.

4.4. Dynamic Entities

Set this option to determine how many entities to render the dynamic entities. The lower the number of dynamic light entities, the greater the performance.

Refer to (Section 3.2.) for reference.

4.5. DL. Performance

Set this option to SMOOTH to always compute for dynamic lights on every tick. Set this option to FASTEST to delay dynamic lights next tick computation.

5. Mods Compatibility

This mod is mostly compatible to any mods. Here are a few tested mods with Mini Dynamic Lights:

Sodium: this mod is highly recommended to be added with Mini Dynamic Lights. However, the options page will be overwritten. My future plans include refactor the options page for dynamic lights.

Mini Dynamic Lights