Settings¶

Settings opens from the main menu and from the pause menu in a game. Most options take effect at once.

What a setting does is behind the (i) beside its name, as is what a menu screen, the graphics profile and a few of Start Game's and Join Game's pickers are for. Point at the (i) to read it, click or tap it to keep it open, and click or tap again to close it. With a keyboard or a controller the text opens by itself while the focus is on that setting, and Read aloud reads it. Warnings, progress and anything that has gone wrong stay in view.

Graphics quality¶

The graphics quality profile picks one of five tiers, Lowest, Low, Medium, High and Ultra, each a set of distances, cloud styles, lighting features and texture resolution sized for a class of machine, from a Steam Deck class handheld to a powerful desktop. Changing any single option afterwards shows the profile as Custom. The tiers are candidates: their hardware roles are intent, not measured compatibility. What each sets is in graphics tiers, and what hardware Goanna wants is in system requirements.

Interface style¶

Settings, Appearance, Interface style chooses how menus and game forms look. It takes effect at once, in the main menu or in game.

Dark glass, the default, draws Goanna's menus, chat, the hotbar and every game form (inventories, chests, furnaces and the rest) on dark translucent panels that blur the world behind them. The game's own pictures are kept: items, the empty armour slot outlines, progress arrows, player models, books and any screen a game draws with its own art. Only the plain window parts, the grey panels, slot squares, tab and button frames, are replaced; a tab keeps the game's icon, and the selected one is ringed. Dark text a game chose for its light panels is lightened so it can be read on the dark glass.
Game theme draws every form in the game's own window art, as the game's authors made it and as Luanti's own client shows it, and Goanna's menus as they were before the glass.

Neither choice changes what a form does or sends to the server. Details, and what is not handled yet, are in interface style.

Rendering options¶

Goanna's important visual systems are adjustable while connected:

View and far distance control how much live and remembered terrain is drawn.
Terrain occlusion removes regions hidden behind opaque nearby geometry.
Material settings control normals, roughness, specular, emission, bevels and surface detail.
Lighting settings control SDFGI, ambient light, lamps, shadows and shafts. With lamp shadows enabled, their budget also limits direct lamp count so excess lamps cannot shine through walls. Distant lighting uses propagated block light. Zero shadow-casting lamps explicitly disables lamp shadows.
The Appearance tab has Natural look, Night visibility and Bloom controls. Natural look adds depth in high daylight; night, dawn and sunset keep their existing grade. Night visibility defaults to 0.5 and adds a faint blue upper sky, supplying cool ambient and bounced light through the existing lighting system. It leaves the horizon colour and night grade unchanged; zero restores the original sky. These preferences are independent of the graphics quality profile.
Volumetric atmosphere controls the local valley-mist volume; set it to zero to disable that froxel cost on slower hardware. The raymarched cumulus stay in the sky pass and share the terrain's sun, twilight and horizon-haze colours.

Terrain that has not arrived from the server cannot be reconstructed by a normal client. Goanna can display remembered blocks and server-provided coarse summaries when the server grants its far-rendering capability; otherwise the horizon is limited by the server's send and generation distance.

Procedural grass¶

Settings, Graphics, Procedural grass draws grass blades on grass topped ground that bend round players and in the wind. It is off by default, off at Lowest and Low, and on at Medium and above, with density, draw distance and interaction settings of its own. It changes nothing on the server. How it works is in procedural grass.

Shader packs¶

Settings, Graphics, Shader pack runs an Iris or OptiFine shader pack, the kind made for Minecraft, in place of Goanna's own look. It sits under the graphics profile, and the Shaders row of Start Game and Join Game, under Materials, makes the same choice: the two always show the same pack, and changing either changes both. Only part of what packs do is supported so far, so most packs look different from their screenshots and some will not load at all; what each popular pack does is in shader pack status.

Packs go in the shader pack folder, which the row shows as text with an Open folder button beside it. On Linux it is ~/.local/share/godot/app_userdata/Goanna/shaderpacks. Put a pack there as it was downloaded from Modrinth or CurseForge, still zipped, or unzipped as a folder holding shaders/. A zip is unpacked once, the first time it is used, into shaderpack_cache beside the folder, and again only if the zip is replaced. Look again lists the folder afresh after adding a pack.

The picker offers None (Goanna's own look) and every pack in the folder by name. Start Game and Join Game have the picker, Open folder and Look again, and the last join's line, but not the options. Under the Settings picker, Pack options lists the selected pack's switches and lists of values, under the pack's own headings and names, as Iris shows them; Pack defaults forgets every change made to that pack. Options that are numbers written into the pack's code, and option profiles, are not offered yet. Each pack keeps its own options.

A pack, and any option, applies the next time you join a world: a world that is already open keeps what it started with. After a join the row says in one line how the pack did, for example how many of its screen passes compiled, whether its own terrain and water shading is in use, or why it did not load.