Sunstone

v2.1.0 Latest, released 2026-10-15

• graphics
• client-only
• Sandboxed: no raw memory access

Download Sunstone 2.1.0sunstone-2.1.0.zip · 411 KB

SHA-256

13bb6a80393a32a0942a26dc6940e4b24b9c20c7a2471796f2c3531473fdf447Copy

The Store in the game installs and updates it for you; the zip is for installing by hand.

Needs

Melange 0.3.0 or later >=0.3.0

Install

In the game, press ` and open Thumper > Store

Authors

Melange

Licence

MIT

Source

plugins/sunstone on GitHub

A client-only graphics overhaul for Worms Ultimate Mayhem, built from Mirage and the engine’s own switches. Shaders, code and original or permissively licensed art only — no game texture, or anything derived from one, is ever shipped.

Quality and look

A Quality setting (Off / Low / Subtle / Bold / Ultra) on the Mods page turns Sunstone’s effects on together with sensible parameters; a Look setting (Golden / Dusk) picks which of the two colour-grading LUTs the grade leans toward, Sunstone lighting and Sunstone water turn the lighting and the water below on or off on their own, Distance blur, Film grain and Lens effects (dirt, flare and colour fringes) turn those off, and Worm skin gives the worms human skin and Worm hair real moustaches (below). All apply live, no restart. Every effect still has its own toggle and parameters in the overlay’s Mirage/Post-FX panel (and in Melange.ini [MiragePostFX]) if you want to go off the preset — a manual change there survives until you next change Quality or a match with a different theme starts.

Quality	Effects on	Notes
Off	none	vanilla rendering: the game’s own shaders and shadow map
Low	SMAA, Sharpen, the single-pass colour and grade, soft shadows, lighting without relief, water without foam, scenery reflections or caustics	2048² shadow map
Subtle	+ ambient occlusion, light and atmosphere (haze, sun glow, cloud shadows, a little bloom), a final dither, contact-hardening shadows, texture relief, shore foam, scenery reflections and caustics	close to the game’s own look; 2048² shadow map
Bold (default)	everything, including contact shadows, light shafts, distance blur, bloom, lens dirt and flare, colour fringes, film grain and a deeper sea	the modern look; 4096² shadow map
Ultra (opt-in)	Bold without SMAA, plus 2x2 supersampling	Bold rendered at twice the resolution each way and scaled down: the cleanest edges and the steadiest textures and water, for a GPU with room to spare

Settings saved as Medium or High by earlier versions read as Bold. The 1.7 fog, sky, bloom and grade effects are replaced by the light and atmosphere effect below and are switched off on upgrade.

Ultra asks Melange for 2x2 supersampling (wum.graphics.setSupersample), so the game renders a 3840x2160 scene for a 1920x1080 window. Ambient occlusion and the light and atmosphere effect switch to their _u copies, which run their reduced-resolution passes at half the usual scale. Pixel-sized blurs, sharpening and fades follow the render scale, so Ultra keeps Bold’s look. The HUD and text render at the higher resolution too. Switching back to another preset restores the game’s own /SSAA and FXAA settings. A Melange without wum.graphics.setSupersample renders Ultra as Bold.

Worm skin

The Worm skin setting (Game / Fair / Medium / Olive / Deep / Mixed; default Game) re-renders the worms’ skin as human skin. Game keeps the game’s cartoon peach (and the effect stays off unless Worm hair is on). A tone gives every worm that skin, with a few percent of variation per worm; Mixed gives each worm one of seven tones (fair, light, medium, olive, tan, brown, deep), picked from its name, so a worm keeps its tone from match to match. Quality Off also turns it off.

It is a Post-FX effect, skin (PostWorld, order 55), driven every frame by mod/client/init.lua: each living worm’s body centre, albedo, heading and how far it moved since the last game tick. It works in screen space:

• Finding the skin. A pixel is a worm’s skin when it lies on the surface of that worm’s body (the same ellipsoid, capsule shell, upright and facing tests and the same depth-gap test against the background that Bloodsand and Kindjal use) and has the colour of the game’s skin (the same classifier: Bloodsand’s measured window of hue, saturation and channel ratios, with Kindjal’s lower hue limit that cuts blood and its widening for Sunstone’s tinted shade while Sunstone’s lighting is on). Hats, helmets, glasses, the eyes and moustaches fall outside it, a little more strictly above the eye line and round the mouth; above the eye line, where a hat is, the hue and saturation limits are Bloodsand’s own, without Kindjal’s widening (a sunlit cowboy hat’s brown reaches into it).
• The new skin. The light on each pixel is read as if it were bare game skin (its colour over the game’s peach, per channel) and put on the new albedo, so the shading, the game’s skin texture and Sunstone’s sun and shade come through. Most of the light’s colour is kept; a real face in cold shade stays warmer than a peach, so part of the cold tint is let go (only where there is light enough to read, so a dark blend keeps its own colour). Measured skin albedos (sRGB: fair 0.94/0.80/0.71, light 0.88/0.70/0.58, medium 0.78/0.57/0.42, olive 0.70/0.53/0.36, tan 0.62/0.44/0.30, brown 0.45/0.30/0.20, deep 0.30/0.19/0.13), all redder than the sand; a deep tone is darker than the peach, softened so it keeps its shading in the shade.
• Realism. Subsurface scattering: the light read off the scene is blurred over about a third of a unit, fully in the red, less in the green and not in the blue, so a shadow’s edge bleeds red into the shade and the game’s texture softens as on a photograph of skin; along the terminator (found from the body’s shape and the theme’s sun) the falloff is softened and turns red-orange, shade is a deeper, warmer, saturated colour, never grey, and a thin rim of the silhouette glows red against the sun as an ear does. Specular: two normalised lobes, a sharp one and a broad one, at skin’s 2.8% reflectance rising to the rim, with a roughness that varies over the body (oilier on the forehead, the nose and the top of the head, then the cheeks, drier elsewhere, in oily and dry patches that stay from afar), broken up by the pores, which do not reflect; plus a soft, pale peach-fuzz sheen at grazing angles, brighter against the light. Melanin and blood under the skin work as absorbers (more melanin is browner and darker, more blood redder, never green): broad blotches and patches, a mottle of about a unit, sparse freckles and a few small moles (how many depends on the worm and the slider, fewer and fainter on deep tones), a flush on the cheeks and the nose with fine broken capillaries close up, redder and slightly darker lips and redder creases, and on light tones faint blue-green veins on the temples, the sides of the neck and the chest. The relief is a real height with its slope, lit from the sun (or the sky in the shade) as a bump on the smooth body normal, softer and warmer in the red as light under the skin blurs it, its hollows a little darker: pores (larger on the nose, the forehead and the cheeks), the skin’s fine lines (tension lines round the body crossed by two finer families at about 40 degrees, the diamond pattern of real skin), an orange-peel undulation and a grain, and the folds of the body (the neck’s crease under the head, the fold under the snout and the lines from its sides past the mouth, faint forehead lines, knuckle-like folds in broken arcs down the body). Detail follows the pixel’s footprint on the skin: every band fades in only where it gets a few pixels a cycle (it never shimmers), and what it can no longer draw is handed on, not dropped: the folds widen into soft darker bands, the slopes of the pores and lines widen the highlight, and the broad blotches, flush and oily patches gain a little contrast, so a worm 60 pixels tall still has a face, a neck and varied skin. The pattern lives in the worm’s own frame, so it moves and turns with the worm and never swims across the screen. Bright skin rolls toward white instead of clipping one channel.
• The mouth. Under the nose Sunstone looks for the mouth’s opening (taps up, down and to the sides, a quarter of a unit apart, for a pixel that is not skin and much darker, or unsaturated like the teeth, or a fifth as bright as the lip, like a closed mouth’s seam; never blood, a wound’s red inside or a black eye’s wash). Skin within about half a unit of it is lip: it keeps the pink the game drew as its own colour (not as the light’s, which lightKeep would pull toward the skin’s) and takes the lips’ redness there, wherever the mouth is and however wide it opens; a worm drawn without an opening keeps a fixed lip line under the snout. Next to the opening, dark pixels (the fold under the upper lip, the corners) do not take the warm, saturated shade or the red light bled from the skin beside them, so a crevice stays dark instead of glowing orange. The tongue, the teeth, the gums and the cavity are not skin and are left as drawn.

The Mirage/Post-FX panel lists it as Human skin and hair, with sliders for the opacity, how much of the light’s colour is kept, subsurface warmth, sheen, pores, mottling and blush, folds and skin lines (detail), freckles and moles (freckles), veins (veins) and peach fuzz (fuzz), and for the hair (below) its strand highlights (hairSheen) and its strands and ragged edge (hairDetail).

With Bloodsand and Kindjal. Bloodsand’s skin (order 51), guts (52) and gibs (53) and Kindjal’s acid (54) find the skin by its peach colour too. Sunstone’s skin runs after all of them, so they classify and paint the game’s skin exactly as before and need no change, and it then recolours only what is still skin, before Sunstone’s occlusion (100) and grade (300), which treat the new skin like the rest of the scene. The classifier gives a soft likelihood, not a hard mask, and the recolouring is a continuous function of the colour (in effect a gain per channel): full blood, raw wounds, the charred crust, intestines and acid are not skin and keep their colours; a thin wipe of blood is a blend of red and peach and comes out as red on the new tone, darker on a deep one; and a pixel on the rim of any of them takes the recolouring up to the skin beside it, so no peach rim is left. What Bloodsand paints by multiplying the skin (the scorch’s singed halo and cooked leather) takes the skin’s gain per channel; its charred crust passes through as painted. Its black eye is not kept as a purple-black paint: inside the bruise’s oval round the eyes, Sunstone reads from it where the bruise is and how heavy (the share of bruise colour among the skin and bruise within about a unit and a half, sampled on a spiral of 24 taps so the hard, swirled edges of Bloodsand’s rings and the outline of the eyes leave no echo, and how much darker than the skin round it it was painted), then draws the skin again under it with a bruise filter: a faint yellow fringe, a red-purple, and a deep blue-purple at its heaviest, softened into the skin round it, so a black eye is a bruise on that tone (a dark brown-purple on a deep one, never a black mask), heavier from across the level so it still reads. The eye whites, pupils and blood beside it are untouched. The oval reaches the mouth’s corners, so round an open mouth (below the eye line) the colours of the mouth are kept out of the bruise test: a lit tongue, the dark-red rim of the opening and the lips’ inner edge are pinker for their blue than any blend of Bloodsand’s purple wash with the skin, and where the opening is found the bottom of the oval leaves the mouth alone. (Without this the tongue was redrawn as skin, a brown blotch on a deep tone, and the dark rim of the opening as a peach halo.) Bloodsand’s wash where it reaches the upper lip is therefore left as Bloodsand painted it there. Near-black pixels count as a bruise only when they are purple (blue over green), as Bloodsand’s lid and socket are: a black afro’s hair over the brow, whose 8-bit colour can read as a dark bruise, is not redrawn as skin (it had orange specks and lines along its lower edge). Blood and Kindjal’s acid take a wet highlight from the sun, and the acid’s pattern is smoothed over about two thirds of a unit so its noise lattice does not show as squares. Kindjal reads any enabled sunstone/* effect as Sunstone being on; the skin effect is off with Quality Off, so that stays right.

Limits. It recolours what the camera sees as skin, so it cannot add what the model does not have (lips, nails, hair). Skin the game lights to a colour outside the classifier’s window (an unusual theme light, very dark caves) stays peach there. While a worm flies fast its body can be a few units from the reported position; the test widens with its speed, but at the edge of a very fast worm a rim of peach can flash for a frame. A purple hat or headband inside the bruise’s oval round the eyes is redrawn as bruised skin, as a black eye is. Bloodsand’s own skin pass can leave a thin line of unpainted peach down the middle of a worm that fills a large screen (its depth-gap test); Sunstone’s skin recolours that line like the skin round it, and inside a black eye bruises it with its neighbours. A worm standing beside a nearer one is recoloured all over (the gap test counts a tap that lands on another worm’s body, or in the volume over its head where its hat or hair is, as clear: a worm beside an afro had the side of its head toward the afro left peach). The outline is anti-aliased by a quarter for each neighbour off the body (by 0.45 before, which left a one-pixel line of the game’s peach round a worm of a deeper tone, most of all where worms stand close). The mouth is found by colour: a dark, non-skin patch of paint just under the nose that is not blood, a wound or a black eye can be taken for the opening, and the skin next to it then keeps its own colour as a lip does. Cost: a pixel away from every worm is two fetches and a sphere test per worm; only pixels on a worm’s surface do more. A skin pixel is about sixteen texture fetches (its own two, four for the depth normal, two for the gap test, eight for the four taps of the light under the skin) and, all told, some hundred hashes and thirty-odd exponentials, about what the previous relief cost with its four evaluations; the bruise’s oval adds 48 fetches, the acid 16, and the search for the mouth’s opening, on the lower face only, 40 to 56.

Worm hair

The Worm hair setting (Game / Natural / Mixed; default Game) draws the worms’ moustaches as real hair, at the same bar as the skin. Game leaves them as the game draws them. Natural keeps each moustache’s own colour family, made real: the game’s orange moustache becomes ginger, its brown one a natural brown, each a little lighter or darker per worm. Mixed gives every worm a natural hair colour of its own from its name (black, dark brown, brown, light brown, dark blonde, blonde, auburn, ginger or grey), weighted by its skin tone as in life (black and dark brown on every tone and most on deep ones, blond and red mostly on light ones; with the game’s peach, the light tones’ weights), so a worm keeps it from match to match. It is independent of Worm skin: hair on game skin works, and so does skin with the game’s hair. Quality Off turns it off.

It is part of the same skin effect (one pass, the same worm slots: the hair colour rides in the thousands of each worm’s pattern seed; three hidden switches skinOn, hair and wigs), so it costs nothing extra away from the worms.

• Finding the hair. The game gives a mod no way to know which attachment a worm wears (its Tash and Hat live in the team data, and Lua’s wum.game.worms() does not report them), so hair is found the way the skin is, by colour and place. Bloodsand documents two moustaches: an orange one, the skin’s hue at a saturation above the skin’s (0.76 to 0.84), and a brown one, the gap its skin window leaves for it (green/red 0.73 to 0.78, blue/red 0.44 to 0.50, dark). Both are taken only in Bloodsand’s mouth zone, the front of the head under the eye line, with its top held a unit and a half below the eyes (the dark line where an eye meets the skin has the brown moustache’s colour), and only where they are not skin. With Sunstone’s lighting on, the brown window’s blue limit moves out a little in shade, as the skin’s does. A pixel inside a moustache that its own colour lets fall out of the window (deep shade, the game’s texture) is filled from the hair round it.
• The hair. The moustache grows down from the upper lip and fans out toward the sides (near-parallel strands that never cross, not a starburst from one point), in the worm’s own frame, so the pattern turns with the worm and never swims. Locks (light and dark bands, their shadow on each other) and strands: thin fibres drawn at the finest scale the pixel can hold (about 3 pixels a strand, blended between two octaves so the scale never jumps as the camera moves, in two layers at a slight angle so it reads as hair and not a comb), each strand with its own melanin, width and tilt, breaking off and starting again along its length, and darker toward the roots under the nose. The colour is a measured hair reflectance, varied along melanin’s absorption (more melanin is browner, then black, never green). The light is read off the pixel as the skin’s is (its brightness against the game’s moustache colour, and with lightKeep its colour), so the game’s shading, Sunstone’s sun and shade and a cast shadow come through. Two highlights as a hair fibre has (Kajiya-Kay): a white one off its surface, shifted toward the tips, sharp, and a broader one in the hair’s colour, shifted toward the roots; each strand tilts both its own way, so the band a lit head of hair shows breaks into glints along the strands and lies on the fibres, not the gaps. From the sun where the pixel is lit, faintly from the sky where it is not. The moustache is shaded as a roll, its upper part facing up and its lower part down, with the hairs following it, so the highlight runs across it as a band. On black or near-black hair the coloured highlight is all but gone and the white one is stronger and a little cool, as on real black hair, so a black moustache is not flat. Against the sun the tips glow in the hair’s colour. The edge is cut along the comb, strand by strand, from how far each pixel lies from the moustache’s edge back along the strands (found to about a pixel, so it is smooth, not stepped): over the first 0.15 to 0.55 of a unit in from the root edge under the nose (close up, within the 24 pixels the taps reach; the root shading starts inside it, so the top has no dark rim) the hair thins and the skin shows between the hairs (only where skin, not blood or paint, lies past it; from afar a soft partial cover of at most two pixels instead), and past the tips and the sides some strands run on over the skin, each its own length, fainter further out; the game’s stair-stepped edge is softened from the hair round each pixel, and the hair’s share fades over a wider range of it, about a pixel more. From afar the strands fade into a shaded hair colour with its sheen, so a moustache a few pixels wide is still a moustache, not noise.
• With Bloodsand, Kindjal and the skin. Hair is drawn after the skin, in the same pass, so the skin under a gap or a stray hair is this worm’s tone. Blood is never hair: it is outside both windows, a blend of blood and moustache keeps its blood part as painted, the hair round a pixel never fills one that is blood, acid or a blend with the acid’s green, and stray hairs go only onto skin, never over blood, a wound, the bruise or acid. The eyes, skin, sand, blood and acid are unchanged by the hair code; with Worm skin on Game the skin stays the game’s peach.

Hair hats (experimental). The Realistic hair hats too setting (off by default, needs Worm hair on) also treats hair-type headwear (an afro, a crest, a wig). What hair headwear the game has, and its colours, could not be checked: the list is in the game’s WORMATTACHMENTS.XOM, which is not in the repository; only the custom team flags name an Afro. A hat cannot be told from hair by its colour alone (a shaded cowboy hat is a dark brown), so a pixel is taken as hair only when all of these hold: it is above the eyes, over a head (a volume up to about 22 units above the body’s middle and 11.5 out, so a tall afro or crest is reached); the colour round it (the mean of eight taps 0.7 of a unit away, not the pixel alone, whose 8-bit colour flickers on a dark wig) is a hair-brown, hue 8 to 29 degrees, saturation 0.22 to 0.88, not bright, outside the cowboy hat’s 34 to 40 degrees (30 when sunlit; 32.5 at the least in the preview) and the helmet’s olive, or a near-black; most of those taps are hair-coloured too; and the surface is busy the way hair is, where a hat’s is smooth (the second difference of the brightness across each pair of taps, which a smooth hat’s shading, near linear at that scale, hardly has). The taps are a fixed distance on the worm, not in pixels, so a wig is judged the same close up and at gameplay distance. It is never recoloured (Mixed does not change it): it keeps its own colour and mean brightness, with locks and strands combed from the crown at half the moustache’s strength and a weak highlight, scaled by the hair’s brightness so a black wig gets no grey speckle. Where the colour round a pixel is hair, it also undoes what the skin pass did to near-black hair pixels (it can read some as skin in deep shade and light them from the skin round them; Worm skin alone no longer leaves orange flecks along an afro’s edge, see above). Grey, white, blond wigs, a mid-brown one at the cowboy hat’s hue (the preview’s brown is 33 degrees, so its close-up mop wig is left alone, like the hat) and a wig the colour of lit skin are left alone (they cannot be told from helmets, caps, the cowboy hat, the eyes, the sand or the head), so a wig the colour of skin is still drawn as skin by Worm skin, as Bloodsand paints it like the head. A hat with a hair-brown or near-black, busy texture would be treated as hair, and a smooth patch of a real wig’s texture is left as the game draws it, which is why this is off by default. Colour alone only holds in light: in deep shade (brightness under about 0.1, more so in Sunstone’s cold shade) a hat of any colour, the cowboy hat and the helmet included, is a near-black, and only the texture test keeps it out; even then it is never recoloured (it keeps its colour and mean brightness and takes only the combed texture). A hair hat’s strands are combed round the head from the front, so straight behind the head they meet at a seam.

Limits. Only the two moustaches Bloodsand measured are known; a black, grey or blond moustache, if the game has one, is left as the game draws it, and so are eyebrows. A patch of other paint in the mouth zone whose colour falls in Bloodsand’s brown moustache window (in the preview, Bloodsand’s black eye under Kindjal’s acid, just over a moustache) is drawn as hair too. The comb direction (out and down from under the nose) and the moustache’s place (below the nose, a unit and a half under the eyes) are assumptions: the meshes and their texture directions are not in the repository, and the preview harness’s moustaches and wigs are stand-ins. Strands need about 12 pixels a unit to show (four a unit at three pixels each); at the game’s usual distance a moustache is a few pixels and shows its colour, shading and sheen. Cost (not measured on a GPU): only pixels round the mouth (and, with hair hats on, over a head) do more: 24 fetches on a moustache (two for the gap test, four taps, four rootward taps and up to three more to place the edge, with their depth) and some 70 hashes; with hair hats on, 18 fetches over a head, and a pixel near a worm also tests the volume over its head.

Texture clarity

16x anisotropic filtering and trilinear minification filtering on the game’s own textures, declared in mod/spice.json’s graphics block and applied by Melange. Off (vanilla) unless this mod is enabled or Melange.ini’s [MirageTextures] overrides it:

[MirageTextures]
Anisotropy=auto   ; auto | an integer 0-16
Trilinear=auto    ; auto | on | off
LodBias=auto      ; auto | a number from -8 to 8

Anti-aliasing and sharpening

Post-FX effects under mod/postfx/, all off until Quality turns them on:

• smaa (PostWorld): SMAA 1x anti-aliasing (iryoku/smaa, MIT — LICENSE.txt in the folder). Use instead of the game’s /FXAA, not with it.
• sharpen (PostWorld): AMD FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening, no upscale (FidelityFX-CAS, MIT — LICENSE.txt in the folder). It fades out on surfaces right in front of the camera and leaves faint steps alone, so magnified textures do not turn blocky; local contrast fades out near the camera the same way.

Atmosphere

All distances are in the game’s world units: a worm is about 30 units tall, scenery sits 50 to 3000 units from the camera, the sea runs out to the horizon and the sky dome is about 9400 units away (about 0.6 of the far plane). Sky pixels are found by that distance, so no effect darkens, fogs or blooms the sky by mistake.

• ssao (PostWorld): horizon-based ambient occlusion and short sun contact shadows from the depth buffer, applied in linear light.
• hdr (PostWorld, “Light, atmosphere and grade”): the world in linear light, height fog toward the sky’s own horizon colour that gives distant islands depth, a sky gradient and sun glow, cloud shadows, light shafts, distance blur on far scenery, bloom, lens dirt and flare, then a hue-preserving display transform that rolls bright colours softly to white, a colour-grading LUT (golden.png, dusk.png, generated by tools/make_luts.py from pure code) and a dither. The textures it reads are generated by tools/make_textures.py. Themes where a part does not fit go without it: no sun glow or light shafts on Horror, Lunar and War, no cloud shadows on Lunar, no warm LUT on cool or violet themes.
• lite (PostWorld): a single-pass version of the colour and grade for Low.
• lens (PostWorld): colour fringes toward the corners, film grain and a final dither.

Shadows

The game draws one shadow map for the whole level at 1024², filtered with a 3x3 average, so shadow edges are blocky and worm shadows are blobs. Sunstone asks Melange for a larger map (graphics.shadowMapSize in spice.json, 2048; the Quality preset changes it live) and replaces the landscape pixel shaders with GLSL versions (mod/shaders/) with their own shadow lookup (and their own lighting, below):

• Soft (Low): a wide, smooth tent filter made of bilinear depth-compare taps. No noise, so nothing shimmers.
• Contact-hardening (Subtle, Bold): a blocker estimate picks between a sharp and a soft kernel, so shadows are crisp where an object meets the ground and soften with distance from it.

Both add a slope-scaled bias and an offset on steep receivers, and surfaces facing away from or edge-on to the sun shade themselves, which removes the stripes (acne) the game shows on grazing slopes and on steep ground close to the camera. The sliders are in the overlay’s Mirage/Shaders panel (shaders/params.ini): filter mode (0 is the game’s own filter), penumbra spread, contact distance and bias. Melange.ini has the last word on the size:

[MirageShadows]
ShadowMapSize=auto   ; auto | vanilla | 512 | 1024 | 2048 | 4096

A 4096² map uses 64 MB of VRAM. Worms and props still cast shadows but do not receive them; that needs Melange work.

Lighting

The game lights everything with one flat ambient colour plus the sun, and clips the result per channel, so large sunlit surfaces wash out to pale cream and anything in shadow loses its shape. Sunstone replaces the pixel shaders of the landscape (Landscape.LandscapeFragmentMain, Landscape.HeightMapFragmentMain) and of the game’s lit models (FixedFunction.FFFragmentMain*Lit*: worms, props, weapons) with original GLSL written against the same inputs:

• Hemispheric ambient: surfaces facing up get the sky’s light, surfaces facing down the bounce light off the ground, so shaded sides of worms, rocks and cliffs keep their form and worms and props sit on the ground with darker undersides. The tints come from a per-theme table.
• Sun and shade: a stronger sun and deeper cast shadows, with a warm sun and cooler shade on the themes that suit it; shade keeps the colour of the surface rather than turning grey or violet.
• Grass and foliage: meadows and leaves move from neon toward natural greens, with softer light through the grass and fine detail on the ground. Off on Arctic, Lunar and Horror, whose colours are the theme’s art.
• Energy-conserving Blinn-Phong: a normalised highlight (narrow and bright on glossy surfaces, wide and faint on rough ones), with a Schlick-style rise at grazing angles. Models use the game’s own specular colour and gloss per material; the landscape uses the theme’s reflectance and gloss.
• Rim light: edges catch the sky and the sun, strongest when back-lit; on Bold it clearly outlines worms and props.
• Texture relief (landscape, Subtle and Bold): fine bumps taken from the texture’s brightness, built from screen-space derivatives so no extra geometry or tangents are needed. It fades out with distance and at grazing angles, where it would shimmer.
• Highlight roll-off: bright colours roll off toward white, as film does, instead of clipping per channel, so sand and stone keep the game’s pale character rather than turning orange.

The per-theme materials (reflectance, gloss, relief depth, sky and ground tints, sun and shade tints, and grade offsets such as Horror’s exposure) are the THEMES table in mod/client/init.lua. The sliders in the Mirage/Shaders panel (shaders/params.ini) cover the same terms, plus sunstoneLight (0 is the game’s lighting) and sunstoneSplit, which keeps the game’s lighting left of a screen x for side-by-side comparisons. Off and the Sunstone lighting setting hand the programs back to the game.

Water

The game’s sea is one textured quad: scrolling normal maps, a colour ramp and a fake environment lookup, drawn half-transparent, with no sense of depth and a lot of shimmer at grazing angles. Sunstone replaces its pixel shader (Water.WaterFragmentMain) with original GLSL that reads copies of the scene’s depth and colour taken just before the water draws:

• Depth and refraction: the water’s thickness along each view ray comes from the depth behind it. Shallow water shows the sand and rocks below in the water’s own hue, gently bent by the waves; the light is absorbed with depth toward the game’s own water, computed from the game’s own water terms (colour ramp, environment map and parameters) at run time, so every theme keeps its sea, Horror’s murky green included.
• Caustics (Subtle, Bold): faint moving light patterns on the floor of the shallows.
• Reflection: the scenery above the water, found on screen and faded out softly beside cliffs and other silhouettes, then a Fresnel blend toward the game’s own sky (taking on the water’s hue, so a pale horizon never turns the sea cyan). Low reflects only the sky.
• Glints: the game’s own white wave glints, a sharp sparkle and sheen from the level’s sun, sun-facing crests and small flecks on ripple crests (fewer on pale water, so they never read as blotches). Facets and crests fade out at glancing angles, so the far sea shows no pale bands. A slow rotated swell and a noise that varies the wave height across the sea hide the normal map’s repeat far out.
• Rich sea (Bold): a deeper, more saturated version of the game’s own water hue with crisp white glints. The colour keeps the hue the game’s own water would have at each pixel, so the shallow tint, sky and seabed never pull an olive or pale cyan sea toward green or teal.
• Shore foam (Subtle, Bold): light, broken, slowly drifting foam where the water is shallow, fading on steep banks, from procedural noise computed in the shader (no texture is shipped).
• No shimmer: each wave layer fades out where its texels shrink below a pixel.

Sliders in the Mirage/Shaders panel (shaders/params.ini): deep and shallow tints, clarity, reflection, waves, refraction, glint, foam, scenery reflections, caustics and rich sea; the sunstoneWater view shows the water depth, the foam, the glints, the reflections or the caustics alone, and sunstoneSplit draws the game’s own water left of a screen x for comparisons. The Sunstone water setting and Off hand the water back to the game.

Cost

Measured at 1920x1080 on a mid-range desktop GPU, paused frame, Off and Bold alternated: Bold adds about 1.5 ms of frame GPU time over Off. About 1 ms of that is the post-FX stack (ambient occlusion 0.34 ms, light and atmosphere 0.41 ms, SMAA 0.12 ms, sharpening 0.06 ms, lens 0.04 ms); the rest is the lighting, shadows and water. Ultra, with its 3840x2160 scene, adds about 6.9 ms over Off.

Client-only

"kind": "client-only" in spice.json. Mirage only touches GL state and shaders; no sim data, Tweak or CRC-listed file is touched by any of the above.

Known limits

• Worms and props cast shadows but do not receive them; that needs Melange to hand them the shadow map.
• Sunlit sand on Building and Wild West reads a little yellower than the game’s own, and on Pirate a little redder.
• After an upgrade from 1.7 the Mirage/Post-FX panel can still list the retired fog, sky, bloom and grade effects as failed. They are switched off and do nothing.

Versions

2.1.0

Released 2026-10-15 · Melange 0.3.0 or later · sunstone-2.1.0.zip (411 KB)

SHA-256 13bb6a80393a32a0942a26dc6940e4b24b9c20c7a2471796f2c3531473fdf447

• New Worm skin setting (Game / Fair / Medium / Olive / Deep / Mixed, default Game): re-renders the worms’ cartoon peach as near photo-real human skin, with subsurface scattering, a sheen that varies over the body, pores, fine skin lines and folds lit by the sun, blotches, freckles, flush and faint veins. Detail follows each pixel’s footprint, so it never shimmers, and moves with the worm. Mixed gives every worm its own tone from its name.
• New Worm hair setting (Game / Natural / Mixed, default Game): moustaches become real-looking hair, with strands, darker roots, the two highlights of a hair fibre and a ragged edge. Natural keeps each moustache’s colour family; Mixed picks a natural colour per worm.
• Realistic hair hats too (experimental, off by default): dark wigs and afros get a hair texture. Found by colour, place and texture, so a brown wig in the cowboy hat’s hue is left alone; a hat is never recoloured. See the README.
• Works with Bloodsand and Kindjal unchanged: the effect runs after them (orders 51 to 54) and recolours only what is still skin, so blood, wounds, guts and acid keep their colours with no peach rim, and a black eye becomes a real bruise on the new tone. Eyes, hats and the sand are untouched; lips keep their pink and the tongue, teeth and inside of the mouth are left as drawn.
• Worms standing close together are fully re-rendered.
• No cost with both settings on Game; otherwise it runs only in a match (not yet measured in game).

2.0.3

Released 2026-10-09 · Melange 0.3.0 or later · sunstone-2.0.3.zip (373 KB)

SHA-256 b4cef26df3470b662817ff18939f76cbab614dfa329a91ff5719d3f874e082d7

Runs on Melange 0.7 and every later version: the plugin no longer names an upper Melange version, so a new Melange release no longer moves it to Mods\.incompatible. No other change.

2.0.2

Released 2026-10-09 · Melange 0.3.0 up to (not including) 0.7.0 · sunstone-2.0.2.zip (373 KB)

SHA-256 46e3b251ed1fe15f845a5d418d8a754760cabbe67b8c588d450837b031cffa89

Runs on Melange 0.6. No other change.

2.0.1

Released 2026-10-07 · Melange 0.3.0 up to (not including) 0.6.0 · sunstone-2.0.1.zip (373 KB)

SHA-256 9d587951751e99f78c655de7b1259449e30be85b69eccc89fd098f70be4ede4b

Runs on Melange 0.5. No other change.

2.0.0

Released 2026-10-05 · Melange 0.3.0 up to (not including) 0.5.0 · sunstone-2.0.0.zip (373 KB)

SHA-256 4efbeb77dd70a88f3466abab610e759625ab1e7904ec468b7231a9ab695d5054

• Natural grass and foliage: meadows and leaves move from neon toward real greens, while gas, barrels, water and sky keep their colours. Set per theme, and off on Arctic, Lunar and Horror.
• New light: a stronger sun, deep soft cast shadows without stripes on steep or grazing ground, worms and props grounded by darker undersides and short contact shadows, and a warm sun with cooler shade where the theme suits it.
• Atmosphere: haze that gives distant islands depth, a soft sun glow, drifting cloud shadows and, on Bold, light shafts. Each is held back where it does not fit: no sun glow or shafts on Horror, Lunar and War.
• Water: clear shallows that show the floor in the sea’s own hue, caustics, reflections of the scenery with no seams beside cliffs, calmer glints with no pale bands far out, and lighter shore foam without bright outlines.
• Light and grade now work in linear light, with a new display transform that rolls bright colours softly to white, bloom and a dither against banding. This replaces the separate grade, fog, sky glow and bloom effects of 1.7, which are switched off on upgrade.
• Ambient occlusion is horizon-based and applied in linear light.
• Bold adds distance blur on far scenery, fine film grain and a lens finish (dirt, flare, colour fringes). New Distance blur, Film grain and Lens effects settings turn them off.
• Every theme keeps its character: Horror its olive sea, Arctic its white snow, Lunar its violet shade, Building its grey stone, and bright sand stays below white.
• Low uses a single-pass version of the new colour, and Low and Subtle are no darker than Off. Ultra runs the heavier effects at half scale on the supersampled scene.
• Measured at 1920x1080 on a mid-range desktop GPU, paused frame: Bold adds about 1.5 ms of frame GPU time over Off, Ultra about 6.9 ms.

1.7.2

Released 2026-10-05 · Melange 0.3.0 up to (not including) 0.5.0 · sunstone-1.7.2.zip (123 KB)

SHA-256 147f0a723bd76749bd9b1ccc2cc094f06791268f6d7e19b4d6efae0607338543

• Runs on Melange 0.4. No other change.

1.7.1

Released 2026-10-05 · Melange 0.3.0 up to (not including) 0.4.0 · sunstone-1.7.1.zip (123 KB)

SHA-256 c1e7e6aa536816519d7591b77c217dd0067158bd0c326be4c27514e29813ec80

• Fixes the sea turning pale and losing its shallows and shore foam in a match once the camera moved.

1.7.0

Released 2026-10-03 · Melange 0.3.0 up to (not including) 0.4.0 · sunstone-1.7.0.zip (123 KB)

SHA-256 7d06d52b7c2f1ff119cd9b56399e5b0d048e2deb6d246ac9218491686dbfbe03

• Bold water keeps the hue of the game’s own sea on every theme, only deeper and more saturated: Horror’s olive sea no longer turns green, and Pirate’s pale cyan stays cyan rather than drifting blue.
• Aerial perspective hazes the sea and other level surfaces in their own hue, so a tinted sky no longer shifts it.
• A new opt-in Ultra quality: Bold with 2x2 supersampling, the scene rendered at twice the resolution each way and scaled down. SMAA is off there, since supersampling already smooths those edges. Measured at 1920x1080 on a mid-range desktop GPU, paused frame: about 7.5 ms of frame GPU time (Bold 3.9 ms) and about 350 MB more video memory. Needs a Melange with wum.graphics.setSupersample; an older one renders Ultra as Bold.
• Blurs, sharpening, bloom, the grade’s local contrast and the texture-relief and ripple fades scale with Melange’s render scale, so they look the same with supersampling.

1.6.1

Released 2026-10-03 · Melange 0.3.0 up to (not including) 0.4.0 · sunstone-1.6.1.zip (122 KB)

SHA-256 9389ae9bcde145e21eca9bf6464c00746605d176fd190d248ddc9ccf55ee3c11

• Bold water is a deep, saturated version of the game’s own sea colour: a calmer reflection, no teal cast, and crisp white glints that cover the water below them instead of turning cream over sandy shallows.
• The grade no longer turns bright blue teal: a cool colour that leaves the range is scaled back instead of having its blue channel clipped.
• Sharpening and local contrast fade out on surfaces right in front of the camera, and sharpening leaves faint steps alone, so magnified textures no longer turn blocky.
• Measured at 1920x1080 on a mid-range desktop GPU, paused frame, Off and Bold alternated: Bold adds about 0.08 ms of render-thread CPU time with Melange’s cheaper GLSL parameter feed (0.14 ms before).