Block shapes
A fence, a slab and a solid wall leave different paths for light. Lucuma works with those shapes and cutouts when calculating shadows.
Modern Minecraft Lighting
Lucuma is an alternative lighting system for Minecraft Java. It works from the blocks in your world, so a room's shape, its openings and the lights you place all matter. We're building it to feel like a next step for Minecraft, with performance that makes it worth leaving on.
Runs on Fabric. No Iris, OptiFine or separate shader pack required.
Fabric no shader loader needed
Block-aware lighting light follows the world's geometry
Performance first lower-end hardware is part of the goal
Your own settings adjust the look and lighting quality
LIGHTING
It starts with the world you've built
Minecraft already knows where its blocks are. Lucuma uses that grid directly, calculates lighting on the GPU and applies it to the rendered frame. Keeping Minecraft's terrain renderer in place is a deliberate choice: Lucuma is designed to fit alongside the rest of your setup.
Colored light
Furnaces, soul fire and portals cast their own colors onto nearby blocks. Where you place them becomes part of how a room feels.
Light that bounces
Lit surfaces pass some of their light and color on to their surroundings. This indirect light brings depth to rooms and sheltered spaces.
BLOCK GEOMETRY
A window, a wall, a place for a torch
Small decisions in a build can change its lighting. An opening lets daylight through; a pillar shelters what sits behind it; a torch brings warmth to nearby surfaces. Lucuma gives those choices more of a presence in the world.
Light and shadow follow the block geometry, whether the source is the sky or something you've placed yourself.
YOUR WORLD
Find the lighting you like
You can keep the effect subtle or let colored light become part of a build. Brightness, light color and indirect-light quality have their own controls, so you can find a look that suits your world and settings that suit your hardware.
Your familiar blocks and textures are the starting point. No special texture pack is required.
PERFORMANCE
Lighting you can leave on
Lucuma has to hold up while you play: turning a corner, crossing a forest or loading new ground. Lower-end GPUs and integrated graphics have been part of the goal from the start. The time and memory each lighting feature costs matter as much as how it looks.
The renderer keeps useful lighting results and schedules updates over time, putting new work into the parts of the world that need it. That's the approach behind the performance work, which is still ongoing during the beta.
HARDWARE
Lower-end GPUs
Integrated graphics are part of the target.
PRIORITY
Smooth movement
Turns and new terrain matter as much as average FPS.
METHOD
Keep useful lighting work
Reuse valid results and update what changes.
RESOURCES
GPU time and memory
Better lighting has to fit within both.
An heir to vanilla lighting
The name comes from lúcuma, a Peruvian fruit with a distinctive flavor. Its place alongside vanilla is the idea behind Lucuma too: something with its own character, built around Minecraft's blocks and textures.
Lucuma should feel like a lighting system Minecraft could grow into. It keeps the game's visual language and gives you room to decide how your world looks.
BETA
Try Lucuma in your own world
Start with a Fabric instance and choose it in Lucuma Manager. The Manager installs Lucuma and adds the matching Fabric API when needed. It also handles updates, repair, rollback and uninstall.
Minecraft Java 26.2 and 26.3 · Fabric Loader 0.19.3–0.19.5 · OpenGL. The Manager is available for Windows. This is a beta; if you run into a problem, its Diagnostics button gives you details to include in a report.
If you'd like to support the work, you can buy us a lúcuma on Ko-fi.
LUCUMA MANAGER
● BETA CHANNEL
LUCUMA
INSTALLATION
Ready
INSTALL LUCUMA →
RepairRollbackSettings