- Dynamic daytime sky. The old static skybox is gone. The sky now changes as the sun moves: deep blue overhead, a warm orange glow on the horizon at sunrise and sunset, and a cooler purple band on the opposite side.
- A real sun. The sun is now a glowing disc with a soft warm halo that gets stronger as it sinks toward the horizon.
- Better clouds near the horizon. Clouds now thin out toward the horizon instead of covering the lower sky in a flat grey haze, so sunsets stay visible.
- Clouds block the sun properly. Clouds passing in front of the sun no longer turn pink.
- Night sky. At night the sky now has a faint deep-blue tint instead of being pitch black.
- Fog matches the time of day. It's dark blue at night, a light haze during the day and warm at sunrise and sunset.
- No more visible world edge. The world now fades into fog at the edge of the loaded area. - You won't see terrain popping in or gaps where chunks haven't loaded yet. The fog line moves smoothly as the loaded area grows or shrinks, and jumps straight into place after a teleport.
- Everything is fogged. Water, lakes, glass, grass and plants now fade into the fog too, instead of standing out against it.
- New graphics options: Limit visibility to load zone and With fog. Both are on by default. Turn them off to get the old look back.
- Much lower RAM use. In our test at render distance 20, the loaded world went from about 2.7 GB to under 1.4 GB.
- Faster world loading. Chunk meshes are placed into GPU memory up to 4× faster, and more chunk work is done each frame, so the world fills in faster.
- Fewer micro-stutters when lots of chunks load and unload at once, such as when flying fast or teleporting. Chunk memory is now reused instead of being freed and allocated again each time.
- Smoother crowds. Animation data for characters and mounts now goes to the GPU in one call per character, which helps in busy areas.