Aetherius
A balanced shaderpack for Minecraft focused on soft lighting, accurate color reproduction, and consistent performance across versions 1.16.5 to 1.21.x+.
Designed to run well on mid-range hardware without sacrificing core visual features like volumetric fog, dynamic shadows, and screen-space reflections.
Features
Lighting & Shadows Soft Wrap Lighting: Smooth light transitions on block faces to avoid harsh black-and-white borders.
Colored Stained-Glass Shadows: Sun and moon rays passing through stained glass project accurate colors onto floors, walls, and pillars.
Screen-Space Colored GI (SSGI): Local bounce light from lamps, glowing blocks, and colored glass onto surrounding surfaces.
Contact Shadows: Screen-space micro-shadows that anchor small details and geometry edges.
Handheld Light: Dynamic illumination when holding torches, lanterns, or light-emitting items.
Materials & Reflections PBR Specular & Gloss: Specular reflections on polished stones (andesite, diorite, granite, blackstone, deepslate), quartz, metals, and armor stands.
Selective Ore Glow: Subtle glow on valuable ore veins (diamond, redstone, emerald, gold, lapis). Nether quartz is intentionally kept matte to match netherrack.
Beacon Beam Fix: Dedicated rendering pass for beacon beams to prevent alpha clipping and depth sorting artifacts.
Water & Weather
Murky Water Physics: Depth-based light absorption and turbidity rather than clear, glowing water.
Screen-Space Reflections (SSR): Real-time reflections of terrain, clouds, and light sources on water surfaces.
Weather Effects: Wet block reflections and puddles during rain, soft angled rain streaks, and morning valley fog.
Volumetric Effects & Atmosphere
Optimized 3D Clouds: Fast volumetric raymarching utilizing empty-space skipping and 2-step directional lighting to minimize GPU load.
Biome-Aware Nether Fog: Automatically samples engine fog color to match all five Nether biomes (Nether Wastes amber, Soul Sand Valley cyan, Basalt Deltas ash, Crimson Forest ruby, and Warped Forest teal).
Volumetric Light Shafts: Crepuscular rays through cave ceilings, tree canopies, and colored glass panes.
The End:
Custom deep-space skybox with an accretion disk singularity and void mist.
Camera & Post-Processing AgX-Based Tonemapping: Prevents clipped, oversaturated highlights (e.g., torches and lava turning pure neon yellow).
Configurable Effects:
Motion blur, soft bloom, contrast-adaptive sharpening (CAS), depth of field, and subtle lens flare.