Beacon Obscura

This small server-side-only mod lets you hide a beacon beam by placing tinted glass above it, while keeping all the beacon's effects working normally.

Ideally, this mod would be obsoleted by Mojang adding this obvious and logical feature to the stock game... it's frankly what we'd expect to happen if a block of tinted glass was put in the beam's path.

Usage

Place one or more tinted glass blocks anywhere directly above the beacon block. The beam will disappear. Remove them to show the beam again.

Everything else works exactly as normal — effects, the pyramid requirement, and using sticky pistons to enable/disable the beacon.

Single-player

In pure singleplayer, this mod won't do anything. However, if you use "Open to LAN", the mod will kick in correctly for all connected players, even if it's still "single player".

If the world is later moved to a server without the mod, or to Realms, or back to plain singleplayer, tinted glass blocks will break the beacons again as normal for vanilla.

How it works

In vanilla, both client and server check for beacon activation, but effects are server-side while rendering is client-side, so changing tinted glass from effectively opaque to effectively transparent just on the server means the effects happen, but the client believes the beacon's inactive, so doesn't render the beam.