I've been meaning to work on improving our shadows for a long time but, for now, there are still some major optimizations to roll out before I can really dive into it. What I managed to do, in a relatively short time, was roll out contact shadows, which have a good effort to benefit ratio.
Contact shadows are a screen-space shadow technique that work to complement regular shadow mapping. They are more precise at capturing local shadow details on surfaces.
After turning them on, the first thing you'll notice is the view model now has self-shadowing:
Player shadows instantly make more sense:
You'll notice it in a ton of other places as well: e.g., in your constructions where sun/moon light leaking inside is mitigated or even eliminated. Unfortunately, however, this technique costs some runtime performance, and they do fail in some situations. You'll notice how grass shadows become much darker and more pronounced. You can expect improvements in this area.
Contact shadows are disabled by default and the toggle can be found in the Graphics configuration menu, under the Graphics Quality, right above the Shadow Cascades option. Feel free to give it a try. I would recommend it for players running on NVIDIA GTX 970/1060 or AMD R9 380 class hardware or higher.