Atmosphere & Visuals

Nytheria is built to look and sound alive: animated mobs, a real night sky, drifting leaves, moving light, living ambience and a custom interface. This page covers the resource packs and the visual and sound mods behind that and the settings the pack ships. Shaders and frame-rate tuning live on Performance & Shaders.

Overview#

Most of the atmosphere comes from three layers. Resource packs change how things look and are animated. Visual mods add sky, weather, particles and light. Sound mods add ambience, music and footsteps. Shaders are the one part that is off by default; press K to turn them on.

Resource packs#

Nytheria has 16 resource packs: 12 zip files and 4 folders in the global resource packs. A 17th, the icon pack for Xaero's radar, is built into the Xaero Icon Fix mod. The packs in the list below are the ones you will notice.

Enhanced Boss Bars is on by default. Earlier versions of this wiki said it is included but not enabled; that was wrong.

The default list has 22 entries in all. It starts with the built-in packs of vanilla and Fabric API, and it also names packs that live inside mods, for example the Freshly Animated pack of Vanilla Backport, Eternal Starlight's 3D mace pack, the Accessorify pack, Continuity's glass pane fix, ClientSort's dark buttons and the black icons of Simple Voice Chat. Later entries have priority over earlier ones, so the Fresh Animations add-ons sit above the base pack, as they require.

Four more packs are always on and never appear in the list: the quest book colour theme with its background shader (Nytheria Questbook), a fix for Farmer's Delight recipe defaults in EMI, a small fix for a Dusty Decorations animation, and the language file and assets for the journal. They are loaded as global packs, so you cannot turn them off in the screen.

Mods that support resource packs. Continuity draws connected textures, and [EMF] Entity Model Features [Fabric & Forge], [ETF] Entity Texture Features - [Fabric & Forge] and [ESF] Entity Sound Features let packs change models, textures and sounds of mobs. Polytone, Resource Pack Overrides, Model Gap Fix and BetterGrassify handle smaller jobs.

Sky, weather and clouds#

Stellar View Remastered gives the night sky real stars and planets, shooting stars and meteor showers. It keeps the vanilla moon cycle and adds light pollution. In the pack it replaces the vanilla sky in the Overworld and the Nether. The shooting-star chance and the meteor-shower chance are both 10. When you switch on a shader, Stellar View hands the sky over to it, and takes it back when shaders go off.

Better Clouds is enabled and keeps the vanilla style. Cool Rain gives rain a different sound on each material. Snow! Real Magic! ⛄ (Fabric) makes snow pile up, and Winter Overhaul adds winter detail to snowy biomes; both are explained on Biomes. Falling Leaves (Fabric) drops leaves from trees: its spawn rate is 10 and its winter factor is 0.1. Wind is on everywhere except in the Nether and the End.

If you play with a shader pack that gets dark early, Early Bedtime lets you sleep from tick 11,500.

Particles and effects#

The pack keeps the particle count under control with Particle Core, which culls and optimises particles; see Performance & Shaders.

Light and fire#

Obscura's Dynamic Lighting, called Dynamic Lighting in the pack, lets held items, dropped items and burning entities light up their surroundings, and the light moves with them. The pack uses mode fancy, range short (the light loses 2 levels per block), own light and entity lights on, and "simple" lighting for creepers and TNT. The key "Toggle Own Light" is not bound. The light group also includes Additional Lights and Sooty Chimneys.

Animation and camera#

The animation pack family is Fresh Animations with its add-ons and Fresh Moves. They need Entity Model Features and Entity Texture Features, which the pack includes. Other mods add to the picture: Not Enough Animations animates the player in more situations, Skin Layers 3D gives skins depth, and ItemPhysic Full makes dropped items lie on the ground.

CameraOverhaul is on and also works in third person; its sway is 0.6 and its maximum screen shake 2.5. TickMender adds a limit for camera shake (strength 0.5, maximum 6 degrees). Better Third Person gives the third-person camera its own rotation.

Blocks and models#

Fast Paintings, Connectible Chains [Fabric] and Beautify: Refabricated polish block details, and the resource pack mods above smooth model gaps and grass edges.

Sound and music#

AmbientSounds 6 plays ambient loops for biomes, weather, caves and the time of day. Biome Music picks music by biome, cave, night, water, the End and the Nether, and the pause between songs is half of vanilla's (delayModifier 0.5). Music stops while a record plays. Presence Footsteps gives footsteps that match the block; its settings key is F10. Cool Rain adds rain sounds and thunder, Subtle Effects adds a few sounds with its particles, Entity Sound Features lets packs vary mob sounds, and Melody is the library that plays background music.

The pack's own sound settings are:

How it fits together#

The layers are tuned to avoid doing the same job twice. Particular has its fireflies, falling leaves and waterfall spray switched off, because Subtle Effects and Falling Leaves already provide them. Fresh Animations needs the three entity-feature mods, so they come with the pack. Stellar View and the shader pack take turns with the sky. Dynamic Lighting and a shader pack with its own hand-held light overlap, as the tip above says. Better Biome ReBlend widens the colour blending between biomes, so biome borders look soft in the Overworld.

Tips#

• Pack order matters: when two packs change the same file, the one with higher priority wins. The default list is ordered lowest priority first.
• Resource Pack Overrides keeps the important packs active and tidies the selection screen, so do not be surprised if some packs do not appear there.
• Press F10 to open the Presence Footsteps settings if your steps sound too loud.
• If you find the screen shake or sway too strong, Camera Overhaul and TickMender both have limits that can be changed in their configs.

Shaders#

The pack ships three shader packs and one generated preset, and shaders are off by default. The pack uses Iris to load them. The full list, the key to toggle them and the settings are on Performance & Shaders.

In the quest book#

The quest book has its own look, with a colour theme and a background shader from the Nytheria Questbook pack. Nothing else on this page is part of a quest; see The Quest Book.

See also#

• Performance & Shaders - shader packs, video settings and FPS tuning.
• Biomes - the snow, river and weather mods in context.
• Controls - the keys for shaders, zoom and the wheel.
• Made for Nytheria - the mods built for the pack, such as Stellar View Remastered.
• Quality-of-Life Mods - the interface helpers.