Java 26.4 Snapshot 2 is a sky-and-HUD snapshot: Improved Transparency fog that finally swallows the seam between terrain and sky/clouds, a celestial occluder so the bottom half of the Overworld skybox hides sun/moon/stars the way your eyes expect underground, and a redesigned F3 overlay that wants to be readable. Soft lab night. Soft mix. No cathedral migrations.
What you’ll notice without opening a shader doc
- With Improved Transparency on, sky/clouds behind terrain blend into render-distance fog — horizon seams should feel less fake
- Overworld sky occluder clips celestial objects under the horizon fog line
- F3 debug overlay redesigned for scanability
- Data pack 122.1 / resource pack 99.0 — bump creator numbers
Creator / tech crumbs
- minecraft:visual/has_sky_occluder — boolean environment flag (default true Overworld, false Nether/End)
- below_heightmap: predicate for heightmap comparisons
- New sky_occluder shaders; clouds path split for OIT offscreen blit
- screenquad.vsh renamed screentriangle.vsh (honesty in naming)
Bug funeral highlights (the ones players feel)
- Clouds no longer render behind foggy terrain (MC-300250 family)
- Underwater sky-vs-fog overlap at sunrise/sunset addressed
- Mushroom swamp overgeneration dialed back
- Chunk-gen crash risk reduced; horse/donkey water exit ride fix
- Wayland negative-monitor mouse, fullscreen focus, and a pile of string/caption grammar fixes
- Enable snapshots → fresh profile
- Creative world, Improved Transparency on, look at distant hills at dusk
- Duck into a cave mouth and check sun/moon occlusion feel
- Open F3 and decide if you can actually read it mid-sprint
- File leftovers with version + steps
Snapshot 2 is fog honesty and F3 manners — small words, big “why did the sky look fake” energy.
PixelCraft
