Smooth Lighting

Smooth Lighting (technically known as ambient occlusion) is a lighting engine added in Minecraft Beta 1.3, with the help of MrMessiah. This lighting engine is set on by default, and can be enabled or disabled by accessing Video Options from the Options menu.

The engine blends lighting to add semi-realistic shadows and glowing from light sources. It can give the illusion of an overall darker appearance. Before Beta 1.3, the feature could only be obtained by modifying the game with the help of MrMessiah's BetterLight mod.

Known Bugs

 * There are lighting bugs on ice and portal when Smooth Lighting is turned on, since the transparency is made by the game, not the textures.
 * The lighting on both still and flowing liquids are not smoothed when Smooth Lighting is on.
 * If turned off it will sometimes cause a bug where stairs will turn black.
 * Smooth lighting doesn't seem to have an effect on paintings.