A space exploration mod for Minecraft. Built on top of Create Aeronautics. Build your vessels. Let physics lift your blocks from the dirt into the quiet of the void. Travel. Land. Explore. Procedurally generated worlds drifting in the dark.
I finally got around to adding the skybox, the sun, and all of the space effects to my mod! For the sun shader, I wanted it to look super bright and alive instead of just a flat texture. I wrote a shader that procedurally generates solar granules and convection cells using 3D noise (FBM) so it looks like it’s churning. Then, I disabled the ACES tonemapping clamp on the sun itself. This lets it output raw HDR values up to 18.0, making it act as an actual light source that triggers a massive, blinding emission.
The biggest headache was the bloom disappearing whenever the sun went slightly off-screen. To fix it, I split the bloom into two parts: the screen-space lens flares (ghosts, streaks) and the massive ambient Rayleigh/Mie scattering. I rewrote the scattering math to run in 3D using the angle of your camera relative to the sun. Now, even if you look completely away, the massive orange and blue sun glow naturally wraps around the edges of your screen. I also added some dynamic wobbling and chromatic aberration to the anamorphic streaks to make the camera lens feel real.
This is just the first beta, but I’m really liking how it looks for now! The planets are also looking way better now too, I added a back-lit refraction glow that bends light around their dark sides, and boosted their atmospheric scattering so they actually bloom when the light hits them. Still got a ton of space stuff to research and code, but this is a solid start.
I made some massive rendering breakthroughs today. The main goal was getting multiple planets working in the 3D world without tanking the GPU. I built a system that lets me add as many planets as I want, tweak their colors, and set their exact positions.
Performance is a big priority, so I implemented a custom Level of Detail (LOD) system. When you are far away, the mod swaps the planet for a low-poly version that keeps the textures intact. As you fly closer, it dynamically cranks up the polygon count so it rounds out into a high-quality sphere. It saves a ton of rendering overhead.
I did run into some weird graphical glitches. At one point, the planets were following the camera around the screen instead of staying fixed in the world, and looking at them from certain angles turned them into morphing blobs.
It took some digging, but I figured out it was a mix of matrix projection issues and backface culling deleting half the triangles. I manually reconstructed the model-view matrix from the camera’s rotation to get the world translations plotting perfectly, and disabled culling during the planet render passes so the spheres stay solid.
Everything is pushed and working great now. I finally have a sky filled with actual 3D planets you can fly towards.
Got the first 3D planets rendering in-game today.
My original plan was to render planets as simple quads facing the camera, but I realized that would become a nightmare once I wanted proper depth, spinning textures, or atmospheric effects. Instead, I wrote a UV sphere mesh generator using Minecraft’s Tesselator and now planets are rendered as actual 3D geometry.
The nice part is that planets naturally intersect with the world and correctly handle depth occlusion without any special tricks. The tradeoff is a higher polygon count, but that’s easy to control through sphere subdivisions and should be plenty fast for distant celestial bodies.
The screenshot is still using placeholder colors and a debug UI, but seeing a real planet hanging in the sky for the first time was a pretty cool milestone.
Started work on a Minecraft space exploration mod for NeoForge, inspired by Outer Wilds in Minecraft.
Today was mostly project setup: getting NeoForge configured, integrating Create Aeronautics/Sable, and setting up Veil for rendering. Most of the time was spent making dependencies play nicely together and fixing configuration issues before I could even think about writing code (Big headache here).
Not much to show yet, but the foundation is finally in place and I can start working on the actual fun stuff: planets, exploration mechanics, and more.
Looking forward to seeing where this project goes.
