the shaders were working fine, as soon as it started raining these round dark blobs appeared everywhere on the ground. i tried turning off puddles and wetness to no avail, and then it just stopped happening during the rain. Next ingame day, its working fine, then all of a sudden the blobs are back. The blobs disappeared again later in the day.

What could even be causing this? Theoretically like to start what does this even look like a symptom of? At the very least i can see it's being caused by the time of day.

My shadows are set to traced.

That's an issue with distorted shadow mapping, lowering the distortion factor under advanced shadow settings should help. I'll have to look into improving that tomorrow