If you can't see a moon or island from the ground - or haven't looked up - then nothing is sent to the engine for rendering that could add extra shadow when the ground lighting is first calculated, so the draw distance of the first player to explore/emerge the land creates a cutoff.FreeGamers wrote:How come when I use mods like planet_moon or planet_mars, which create land way up above my server, around 5000 nodes up, does it not create shadows like Hallelujah Mountains?
Is there a cutoff point for the light calculations?
If the moon/island is within draw distance, and you look at it before the land beneath has been drawn (i.e. before the land's lighting was calculated), then it gets more complicated. I think shadows are calculated to the bottom of each chunk (80 blocks high), and then whether they are propagated to the chunk below depends on whether any of the other mods you have loaded are calling calc_lighting() in the on_generated event with propagate_shadow defaulted to true.
If there's at least one empty chunk between the land and the moon/island then the shadows might not propagate - depending on what other mods are doing, so somewhere between 80 and 240 blocks apart it might cut out.
If the ground and moon/island are in the same chunk together then shadow will always be cast.