Daniel Saner

That sounds great re Jeb's tweets. Personally, I believe it when I see it, considering how many versions the fix has already been announced for 😉 but it's good to know that somebody seems to be looking at it currently.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who has witnessed the glitch causing monsters to spawn where they shouldn't. I have read some other reports claiming the bug is purely cosmetic and doesn't have any influence on gameplay. But I am quite sure monsters spawn in black lighting glitch spots that otherwise would have too high a light level.

Out of curiosity, is there no third-party mod that affects/fixes this bug in any way? There are mods that seem to modify or improve most of the rendering parts of the game. Is it possible that any of them make this bug disappear, or is it written too deeply into the lighting system?

I don't know how this figures into the overall explanation of why the bug occurs, and maybe it is pretty obvious, but I haven't seen it mentioned in any comment so I thought I'd point it out: logging out and back into the world also seems to fix nearby places where the bug occurs. Explore the world, find a black blotch, log out, log back in, and the blotch is gone.

The bug persists in 13w17a.

Persists in 13w11a. The patches are as dark as they've always been for me.
Did the new lighting engine not make it for 1.5 or does it just not fix the bug? At this point I wonder whether I'll have to stay on 1.2 forever.

I agree that this bug feels rather "Major" than "Minor". I haven't played Minecraft in months because of it. I don't have much fun playing it if the worlds look ugly, and there are direct effects on gameplay as well. As already mentioned, the game can lag for seconds if a large glitchy area is updated, and also you cannot see what's in a cave until you enter it.

I'm surprised that there isn't more pressure from the community concerning this, since it seems to affect everybody, and in my view it makes the game pretty unenjoyable. (Persists in 1.4.6)