Candles don't work like torches. Logically, the flame should glow but not the candle itself. Though the candles itself glows but not the flame (looks odd)

i can add an adjustable setting just for that, but im pretty satisfied with 2.0. on top of that, i will probably make it also scale with the emissive brightness multiplier

Oh yes that's a really good idea. Though I really like the brughtness and glow of the torches. I don't think it would make much sense if you added one slider for every emitter since just the candles need adjustments. So I think an adjustable slider for just the candles would do and maybe some seperate ones for other emitters.

And since we're talking about sliders, here is another suggestion:
In composite1.fsh line 355 (water caustics code) I added a multiplier for the water caustics brightness cause in my opinion they do look realitic but are way too dark (compared with real-life caustics and for example the ones from the Seus Shader).
caustic += max( 1.0-sin( 1.0-pow( 0.5+sin( small_wave*3.0 )*0.5, 25.0) ), 0)*MULTIPLIER;
As a multiplier I found the number 4.0 to be quite attractive and realistic.
The only issue I had with this is that the caustics are the same brightness during night then which of course is way too bright then. I you like, you can have a look into it :)

that is exactly what it did before you opened the first issue. so i will just revert it back to this.

the flame does glow. it glows at the brightness of the highest torch light level.

that is exactly what it did before you opened the first issue. so i will just revert it back to this.

the flame does glow. it glows at the brightness of the highest torch light level.

Yep, just noticed it myself, thanks for reverting back to the old method. Though as you can see at this picture, a single candle barely lights up the scene at all and the glow only becomes quite realistic when adding 4 torches. All other candle numbers (3 or lower) on a single block are extremely dark. Is there a way to increase the glow amount and the amount of light the torchs adds to the surrounding scene without adding it to the light list?

as i said before, i cannot control how much light comes out from any blocks, i can only control the gradient of the light.
i also cannot do a special gradient for different blocks, they all have one single gradient. i cannot change this. this is how vanilla minecraft does its lighting.

with that in mind, please realize that a single candle seemingly gives off almost no light even in vanilla, without a shader, in a similar scenario to your screenshot.

there is a torch light brightness multiplier in shader settings -> ambient light -> torch color but it wont do much to something with already so little light,.

Okay, since there is no way I accept it as it is, thanks for having a look into it. And I have to say that the candles look really nice. Though I have commented your commit where you added the glow multiplier in gbuffers_all_particles.fsh. I have tried a couple of numbers and 5.0 looks really realistic

i do not know if i can specify specific particles to make it such that i can make one particle brighter than another. i have access to entity ID's, block ID's, but no particles. i would have to resort to some half working way using colors to narrow it down, and if a resourcepack comes along that changes the color, it would ruin it. the particles are not related to the block's ID on the shader side of things. that's something i cannot change.

and for the water caustics.... i fine tuned them to look how they are. Being realistic is not a goal for this shader. i might add a setting to control their brightness.

by the way, why not join a discord server i'm in? it would make communicating alot more convenient. here is an invite to the shaderlabs discord if you want: https://discord.gg/RpzWN9S

Okay, then I'd be fine with an intensity slider for the particles as a whole.

For the water caustics, yes, a brightness slider would help out there. Looking forward to it :)

Discord is a good suggestion in general, I just sent you a request. Though I will probably be more active on Github to watch the progress with the shader than on Discord