🕯️ What it is
Every vanilla candle, plain and all sixteen dyed colours, can be lit and carried in your hand. A lit candle in either hand lights the ground around you as you walk. The light is real, placed by the server, not a trick your own screen plays: other players see it, mobs refuse to spawn in it, and a friend with no mods installed at all still gets the glow. Water and rain put it out. Lava does not.
You sneak, right-click, and the candle in your off hand catches. Then you walk into the cave with the sword still in your main hand and the dark just keeps backing off, ten feet at a time, without a single torch spent on the walls. Other players crest the ridge and see a small warm dot moving through the night, which is you. Then you step outside, the rain finds you, there is a puff of smoke, and you are feeling your way back to the campfire like a person in a period drama.
👥 Playing with friends
The light is real: everyone sees your glow, even friends on unmodified vanilla clients
⚠️ Before you install
- The vanilla-client claim is argued from the loader's source and an audit of the jar, but nobody has yet sat at an unmodified client and joined a server running it.
- The in-hand flame, the feel of the moving light, and rain extinguishing have never been watched in a real client; the placement logic was verified on a headless server only.
- Real light has a real cost: one block update per block each holder walks across. Fine for a handful of players, worth knowing for a hundred.
⏱️ Your first 5 minutes
New to this mod? Do these in order and you will have seen the point of it.
- Craft or find any candle, any colour. There are no new items; if you have candles, you have this mod.
- Sneak and right-click with it in hand. It lights, with the ordinary candle sound.
- Move it to your off hand and keep the pickaxe or the sword in the main. That is the whole point.
- Walk into a cave. The circle of light comes with you, and nothing spawns inside it.
- Step out into the rain. Puff. Relight it from a campfire, a torch, a lantern, fire, a lit candle, or lava, whichever you pass first.
🔁 How it works
Lighting and gutting
Sneak-use toggles a held candle lit or unlit. Touching the candle to any flame in the world, a campfire, a lit candle block, a torch, a lantern, fire or lava, also lights it. Water, swimming, and rain with open sky above all put it out with a puff of smoke; lava, notably, does not. A config option, requireIgniter, makes lighting demand a flint and steel or fire charge somewhere in your inventory, without consuming it.
Tip: Caves have no weather. Underground, the only thing that can put your candle out is you, or a swim.
Real light, not screen light
Other held-light mods brighten the world on your own client, so the glow exists only for you. Hand Candle instead has the server place an invisible vanilla light block at the holder's head and pick it back up when they move, unequip, die, log out, change dimension, or the chunk unloads. Because the light exists in the world, mob spawn checks respect it and every player sees it.
Tip: Stand still and the light costs the server nothing at all; it only updates when you cross into a new block.
Vanilla friends included
The mod adds no items, no blocks, no entities and no network messages of any kind, so a completely unmodified vanilla client can join a server running it. That friend sees your circle of light, and sees an ordinary unlit-looking candle in your hand, because the flame on the item is the one part only a modded client can draw.
Placing and dropping
A lit candle in your hand places a lit candle block; an unlit one places it unlit. A lit candle thrown on the ground keeps glowing where it lies. Place a candle into water and it comes out unlit, the way vanilla would have it.
Never burns down, unless you ask
By default a candle is never consumed; it is a reusable tool, not a fuel. Setting burnMinutes in the config to any number above zero makes candles burn away after that many minutes of being lit, for servers that want light to cost something.
Plays nicely with LambDynamicLights
If you run LambDynamicLights, this mod ships the definition file that teaches it about lit candles, so you get LDL's smooth client-side glow layered on top of the real server light. There is no dependency in either direction, and useLightBlocks = false turns the server-side light off entirely for people who prefer the pure client version.
🎒 Items & blocks
Lit Candle
Any vanilla candle, carrying a small flame while lit in hand. All seventeen colours work identically; the flame on the icon is drawn only for players who have the mod installed.
Where: Hold any candle and sneak-use, or touch it to any flame in the world.
🕯️
The Light Itself
An invisible, intangible vanilla light block, level 10 by default, that the server keeps exactly at your head while a lit candle is in either hand. Two holders standing close together politely share one.
Where: You never touch it. The mod places it, moves it, and cleans it up, and a sweep on server start removes any a crash left behind.
📜 Lore
Flavour, not rules. None of this changes how the mod behaves.
The rain has opinions
Fire has been portable since the first torch, but a torch never had to answer to the weather. A candle carried into the open is a small argument with the sky, and the sky wins every single time it is asked. Lava, on the other hand, respects a fellow flame.
🎁 Jokes & trivia
Bits you might miss
- Lava will not put your candle out. Water will. Swimming will. Rain will, but only if the sky can actually see you. The candle knows exactly which element it answers to.
- The intended loadout is sword in one hand, candle in the other, which makes every cave dive a very slow, very violent candlelit vigil.
- requireIgniter makes lighting demand a flint and steel in your inventory but never spends it. The candle just needs to know you came prepared.
- A lit candle dropped on the ground keeps burning, so you can breadcrumb a cave in tiny flames like the world's most flammable fairy tale.
- The /handcandle sweep command exists for cleaning up after a crash, and the mod runs it on every start anyway, which makes it the janitor of its own light.
From the workshop
- The mod registers nothing at all: no items, blocks, entities or network channels. An automated audit of the shipped jar fails the build if that ever stops being true, and it is why vanilla clients can join.
- Placing a lit candle as a lit candle block needed zero code in the end; a single data tag on the item does it, a fact discovered mid-build.
- The light blocks have to be written with a special no-neighbour-update flag; without it, every step a holder took would trip nearby observers twenty times a second.
- The crash sweep deliberately leaves hand-placed light blocks alone: a light block whose position is not in the mod's ledger is somebody's build, not its litter.
- The lit-candle flame is seventeen edited vanilla textures generated by a script, one per candle colour, keyed so that clients without the mod simply see a plain candle.
❓ FAQ
Do my friends need the mod to see my light?
No. The light is a real block the server places, so everyone sees it, including players on completely unmodified vanilla clients. They just will not see the little flame on the candle item itself.
Does it actually stop mobs spawning near me?
Yes. Spawn checks read real block light, and this light is real. That is the concrete advantage over client-side held-light mods, which leave the server believing you are standing in the dark.
Can I light a torch in my hand instead?
No, candles only, all seventeen of them. Torches already have a job.
Do candles get used up?
Not by default. If you want them to burn down, set burnMinutes in the config and they become consumable.
How bright is it?
Light level 10 by default, a bit dimmer than a torch's 14, and configurable from 1 to 15.
Client mod or server mod?
One jar does either. On a server alone, the light and the weather rules all work and the item just lacks its flame graphic. On a client alone, in singleplayer, everything works.
⬇️ Get it
Status: The jar compiles and the author has tested it himself, but it has not had a real playtest yet.
- Install NeoForge, Forge, Fabric for Minecraft 1.21.1. The
install guide walks through this assuming no prior knowledge.
- Drop the mod's
.jar file into your mods folder.
- Everyone on the server needs it.
- Launch the game with that loader's profile selected.
📦 Where is the file?
This wiki documents the mods; it does
not host them. Builds live in the project's own repository under
mc-hand-candle/build/libs/.
Bulletpies
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