AuraLite is a modern, lightweight, and highly optimized shader pack built on top of the OpenGL 4.6 / GLSL 460 standard. It is specifically designed and tested for Minecraft 1.16 – 26.2 with Sodium + Iris (and compatible with OptiFine, Oculus).
AuraLite delivers a breathtaking, realistic visual experience without overcomplicating the screen with bloated post-processing effects (such as aggressive motion blur or heavy bloom). A lightweight HDR bloom (gaussian pyramid since v1.1.3, half-resolution and skippable since v1.1.4) softly glows emissive sources without smearing the scene. Optional FXAA/SMAA anti-aliasing, SSR, TAA, godrays, and SSAO are profile-scaled so AuraLite keeps high FPS and smooth frametimes on modern GPUs.
🧪 v1.1.4 note: Adds tiny physical-atmosphere LUTs (begin/begin1 → 64×32 colortex5 + 32×16 colortex6), a hard Distant Horizons seam (the v1.1.3 screen-door dither punched white holes on DH 3.2), DH-aware TAA with a material reactive mask, a Gerstner water spectrum, half-res schedulable bloom, and an Iris 1.7.6 compatibility workaround (dhShadow.enabled=false by default). TAA remains on by default in HIGH/ULTRA/EXTREME; camera jitter stays OFF. See changelog below.
ℹ️ Historical note: older changelog sections below are preserved as original release notes.
🚀 What's New in v1.1.4 — Atmosphere LUTs, Distant Horizons Seam Fix & Half-Res Bloom
Version 1.1.4 rebuilds the experimental physical sky around shared low-frequency LUTs, replaces the hole-producing DH screen-door seam with a deterministic hand-off, and cuts post-process cost with skippable half-resolution bloom. It also finishes the TAA story for Distant Horizons (correct DH reprojection + Halton jitter on LOD geometry) and swaps glittery water fBm for a coherent Gerstner swell.
Tiny HDR LUTs, not fullscreen buffers. v1.1.3 deleted unused full-screen colortex5/colortex6 to save VRAM. v1.1.4 brings them back as 64×32 solar-transmittance (colortex5) and 32×16 multi-scatter / ground-bounce (colortex6) tables — kilobytes, not megabytes.
begin.fsh rebuilds direct solar transmittance every frame: sun elevation on X (−0.16…1.0, including civil twilight), camera altitude on Y (0–30 km), Kasten–Young airmass × Rayleigh + aerosol extinction, zeroed below the night hemisphere.
begin1.fsh layers bounded multi-scattering and biome-aware ground bounce on top of that transmittance. Noon is Rayleigh-blue; low sun is warm; swamp/snow/vegetation tints come from GROUND_BOUNCE_MODE.
Shared by every physical-sky consumer — gbuffers_skybasic, terrain fog, water analytic reflection, volumetric godrays, clouds and the SSR sky fallback all sample the same LUTs instead of each running a second atmosphere march.
When SKY_MODE=0 (every shipped profile) the LUT passes write constants and cost almost nothing. Enable Physical Sky manually in the Experimental tab.
SKY_TEMPORAL — rotation-only history blend for the sky (requires TAA). Physical sky uses a higher history weight than the animated gradient sky so stars/aurora do not trail.
The swamp detector now also matches BIOME_MANGROVE_SWAMP.
🌍 Distant Horizons — Hard Seam, TAA & Iris Workaround
⚠️ AuraLite still does NOT claim full Distant Horizons compatibility. v1.1.4 is a targeted correctness pass on the v1.1.2/v1.1.3 experimental path.
Hard deterministic hand-off at far. The v1.1.3 16 m screen-door dither discarded random LOD fragments in the seam band; on DH 3.2 those holes showed sky/white whenever vanilla geometry did not fill the same pixel. DH fragments with dist < far are now simply discarded — less cinematic, never stochastic.
DH receives the same optional Halton camera jitter as vanilla gbuffers. composite1.fsh reprojects DH pixels through dhProjectionInverse + dhPreviousProjection (vanilla matrices have the wrong far plane).
Conservative DH history cap (0.45) — LOD meshes change topology as chunks stream; they participate in TAA but cannot leave long trails.
DH_BLOCK_ILLUMINATED tag colortex2.a = 0.24 — distant sea lanterns / glowstone stay self-emissive even when they are not lava-orange or portal-violet. Extra DH material classes: DIRT, SAND, TERRACOTTA.
dh_water now honours WATER_WAVES / riffles / transparency / specular, applies the frozen-ocean navy floor, and occludes against dhDepthTex1 (plus Iris depthtex1 via view-space Z, because raw depths use different projections).
DH_SHADOW_RANGE — Seam (1.25×) / Extended (2×) / Far (4×) of vanilla far. LOD receivers can keep sampling the shared shadow map past the vanilla chunk edge.
Shadow-map footprint rebalanced for DH: MED 192 m, HIGH/ULTRA 512 m, EXTREME 768 m (VERY_LOW/LOW stay 60 m, no shadows).
dhShadow.enabled=false by default. DH 3.2.0-b + Iris 1.7.6 can replace/cull the vanilla terrain shadow pass — symptom: mob shadows remain, block shadows vanish even in vanilla chunks. Users with a verified working Iris/DH bridge can turn the DH shadow pass back on and then use DH_SHADOW_RANGE.
🎯 TAA — Sky Temporal Resolve & Material Reactive Mask
Sky temporal resolve (SKY_TEMPORAL) — sky pixels have no stable world position, so history is reprojected with camera rotation only (no translation). Gradient-sky history weight is lower (0.28) than Physical (0.46) so clouds/aurora/meteors do not smear.
Material reactive mask — water (0.8), foliage (0.62) and emissive/lava (< 0.5) cut history weight by 46% / 30% / 58%. Without a per-object velocity buffer this is what stops waving leaves and water from ghosting after TAA.
🌊 Gerstner Water Spectrum
Replaces the v1.1.3 value-noise / fBm central-difference normal in final.fsh. That field was mathematically stable but read as high-frequency random glitter.
A 4-direction travelling swell (dominant wind + cross swell + two low-amplitude ripples) produces analytic slopes and a calmer default surface. Amplitude is clamped to ±0.22.
Near-water vertex swell is slightly reduced (0.04/0.02 → 0.032/0.016) so the geometric mesh matches the new reflection spectrum.
Dead Voronoi lava-height helpers removed from gbuffers_water, gbuffers_terrain_translucent and gbuffers_terrain (lava stays texture-driven).
✨ Half-Resolution, Skippable HDR Bloom
New master BLOOM toggle. VERY_LOW / LOW skip the entire 5-pass chain via program.composite3–7.enabled=BLOOM (Iris/OptiFine do not even dispatch the programs).
colortex3/colortex4 are half-resolution (size.buffer = 0.5 0.5). Gaussian strides are doubled so the world-space radius stays the same; final.fsh linearly upsamples the glow.
TAA similarly gates composite1/composite2, so lighter profiles no longer pay for unused fullscreen passes.
🌌 Aurora Quality
New AURORA_QUALITY — Soft 8 / Balanced 12 / Silky 18 raymarch steps, with a centred globally-animated ray start (the previous per-pixel hash grain is gone).
🎚️ Profile Rebalance (v1.1.4)
Profile
Shadows
DH receivers
TAA
Bloom
Sky temporal
VERY_LOW / LOW
❌ 512 / 60 m
Seam
❌
❌
❌
MED
✅ 1024 / 192 m Balanced
Seam
❌
✅ Balanced
❌
HIGH
✅ 2048 / 512 m Balanced
Extended
✅
✅ Balanced
✅
ULTRA
✅ 4096 / 512 m Aggressive
Extended
✅
✅ Balanced
✅
EXTREME
✅ 8192 / 768 m Aggressive
Far
✅
✅ Strong
✅
Camera jitter remains off by default in every profile.
🚀 What's New in v1.1.3 — True TAA, HDR Bloom Pyramid & Black-Water Regression Fix
Version 1.1.3 completes the TAA pipeline (Halton sub-pixel camera jitter + YCoCg variance clipping), replaces the old single-pass bloom with a true multi-octave HDR gaussian pyramid, and fixes the long-standing black-water regression with MRT-proof water detection. It also adds procedural raindrop rings, biome-aware murky swamp water, underwater plant sway, post-TAA sharpening, and a ~48 MB VRAM cleanup.
Halton(2,3) sub-pixel camera jitter — every gbuffer vertex shader can offset gl_Position by a rotating 8-frame Halton pattern (±0.5 px). Previously TAA only blended history without jittering the sample point, so it could only blur noise instead of reconstructing sub-pixel detail.
TAA_JITTER option — Off / Subtle / Standard / Strong (new in v1.1.3). The jitter is OFF by default in all profiles for a rock-steady image; Subtle (±0.25 px), Standard (±0.5 px) and Strong (±0.75 px) scale the amplitude for users who want the full sub-pixel reconstruction (removes high-frequency shimmer at the cost of a slight temporal wobble). Requires TAA enabled.
Previous-frame jitter compensation in composite1.fsh — the old frame's offset is re-added to the reprojection (with the same strength scale), so static images converge instead of smearing ~0.5 px. Only active while jitter is on.
YCoCg variance clipping (μ ± γσ) replaces the axis-aligned 3×3 min/max box — the old box caused ghost trails on saturated high-contrast edges (fences, wires, hot specular) while being too tight on flat gradients. Clip width scales with TAA_STRENGTH: 1.50 Light / 1.25 Balanced / 1.10 Stable.
Frame-rotated IGN dithers now resolve cleanly — godrays and volumetric clouds rotate their interleaved-gradient-noise patterns per frame; with the temporal resolve they integrate into smooth gradients instead of shimmering.
TAA is on by default in HIGH / ULTRA / EXTREME profiles (off on VERY_LOW / LOW / MED for maximum FPS); it can be toggled in the Post-Processing menu, and TAA_STRENGTH presets the variance-clip tightness.
Replaces the v1.0.1 single-pass 3×3 neighbour glow, whose ~1.5 px radius could only produce a tight halo.
New 5-pass chain: threshold brightpass (0.75 luma soft-knee, exposure-aware) → tight separable gaussian (9-tap, σ≈2.0) → wide separable gaussian (4× stride). Successive blurs compose to an effective σ ≈ 8.2 px — a soft cinematic falloff around the sun/moon disks, lava, portals and hot specular, without a mip chain.
Runs after the TAA resolve, so the bloom energy is temporally stable.
New HDR_BLOOM option (Subtle 0.06 / Balanced 0.12 / Strong 0.22 amplitude) wired into every quality profile.
💧 Black-Water Regression Fix — MRT-Proof Water Detection
Root cause: on some Iris builds the translucent pass drops the colortex1/colortex2 MRT writes entirely — water then arrives with a zeroed normal + alpha + lightmap. The emissive fast-path (alpha < 0.5) swallowed it and every tag/lightmap-based system died with it.
Detection ladder: primary = colortex2.a = 0.8 tag; rescue = the depth difference (depthtex1 solid-only vs depthtex0) proves a translucent surface on top, then a hue-fingerprint classifier on the albedo rejects portals (violet, green-starved) and lava (blue-starved) while accepting water (blue/blue-green, never pale). Water, ice and glass classify; torch flames, portal sparkles, squid ink, pale ice and clear glass do not.
Synthesized flat water normal when the decoded normal is untrustworthy (MRT loss or clear value), so Fresnel/reflections still have sane inputs.
Analytic sky reflection (waterSkyRefl) — zenith/horizon gradient + warm sun-side glow, dimension-aware (Overworld palette, Nether biome sheen, End violet sheen), applied via Schlick Fresnel with a 0.20 floor (pure F0≈0.02 at steep look-down angles was exactly what let shadowed water crush to black), multiplied by skyLight so cave water stays dark. This is the actual black-water fix and works with SSR disabled.
Diffuse ambient floor for rescued pixels whose lightmap may read zero.
Navy-tint floor in gbuffers_water/gbuffers_terrain_translucent — frozen-ocean biome tints (e.g. 0x3938C9) can no longer crush R/G to black after the gamma pipeline.
WATER_DEBUG diagnostics overlay (Off / Classify / Lightmap / Raw tag alpha) — green = healthy tag, red = depth-rescued, yellow = rescued from the emissive path, magenta = lava/portal-guarded.
🪟 SSR & Refraction Fixes (final.fsh)
Procedural sky fallback for reflection rays that leave the screen or hit the sky — previously black (the reason the waterMirrorBoost hack existed); now a day/night/sunset/storm-aware gradient with moon-phase brightness, Schlick-Fresnel weighting and edge fade.
SSR march start moved 1.0 → 0.5 view units off the surface so the water plane at the player's feet still reflects near-field geometry.
MRT-proof water detection reused for SSR/refraction (same hue guards as composite.fsh).
Procedural raindrop rings on wet up-facing surfaces — two layers of expanding, world-stable circular waves perturb the SSR normal so rain reads as thousands of tiny ripples instead of one flat mirror.
🔍 Post-TAA Sharpening (POST_SHARPEN)
Gentle 5-tap unsharp mask (0.18 amplitude, clamped ≥ 0) applied to the resolved image before refraction/SSR/bloom work, recovering texture detail softened by TAA's history blending. On in MED+ profiles.
☁️ Volumetric Clouds — Quality Scaling & Dithered Ray Start
New CLOUD_QUALITY option: 8 / 12 / 16 raymarch steps (was hardcoded 12) — Cheap / Standard / High.
Dithered ray start (frame-rotated IGN) on geometry pixels when TAA is enabled: the frame-rotating pattern is temporally resolved into a smooth volumetric integral, killing the 12-step ribbing on thick cumulus without the v0.2.5-era "swimming". Sky pixels keep the stable centred start.
🌿 Underwater Plants Sway
New block class 10010 (seagrass, tall_seagrass, kelp, kelp_plant, sea_pickle) — fronds sway in a current, phase-shifted by height so the tips lag the base, storm-agitated along with the surface foliage path. Displacement is mirrored in shadow.vsh so shadows follow the visible fronds.
🌊 Biome-Aware Murky Water
Smoothed swamp/mangrove detector (isSwampBiome) — swamp water absorbs more red and reads greener and murkier (absorption (0.23, 0.038, 0.10), deep colour pushed to dark green) instead of open-ocean blue.
🧪 Physical Sky — Warm Ground Bounce
The experimental SKY_MODE=1 atmosphere now includes a warm ground-bounce term: terrain's ~15–20% mean albedo re-scatters in the lower atmosphere (strongest at the horizon and with a high sun), removing the "sterile" blue-bias horizon band.
🌇 Lighting & Ambience
Rayleigh-tinted day ambient — the day hemisphere ambient now follows the actual sun extinction: golden-hour light is warm and blue-depleted instead of static grey-blue.
Held-light temperature — strong held sources (sea lantern, glowstone, shroomlight, lava bucket) read slightly cooler than candle-strength light.
🌍 Distant Horizons — Soft Seam
The v1.1.2 hard discard at far + 16 is replaced by a screen-door dithered transition band: DH LOD fragments stochastically blend into vanilla chunks over 16 m, so crossing the boundary or changing render distance no longer shows a hard cut. The pattern is static per frame (DH-only pixels are excluded from TAA history).
🛠️ Pipeline & VRAM Cleanup
Removed colortex5/colortex6 format directives — never read or written, but each forced Iris/OptiFine to allocate a full RGBA16F screen buffer: ~32 MB saved @1080p, ~128 MB @4K.
shadowcolor0Format RGBA16F → RGBA8 (it only carries LDR tex * glcolor): another ~16 MB @1080p / ~64 MB @4K.
shadowcolor1Format removed (nothing ever wrote to it).
colortex0Clear = true — no stale garbage on the first frame or after a window resize.
colortex3/colortex4 are now actually used by the bloom pyramid; the full 8-buffer HDR pipeline is engaged.
🚀 What's New in v1.1.2 — Render-Distance Shadows & Experimental Distant Horizons (Partial)
Version 1.1.2 extends shadow rendering to the actual render distance with an adaptive LOD system, fixes HDR/TAA pipeline strictness, cleans up deprecated GLSL, and introduces partial, experimental Distant Horizons support (WIP) — without claiming full compatibility yet. Work is ongoing.
🌗 Extended Shadow Distance with Adaptive LOD
Shadows now reach render distance.shadowDistance was 60-160m with a hard cutoff at shadowDistance. Now it scales with quality profiles: 60m (VERY_LOW/LOW, no shadows) → 120m (MED) → 256m (HIGH/ULTRA) → 384m (EXTREME). The cutoff is replaced by a soft fade smoothstep(far*0.85, far*0.98).
New SHADOW_LOD toggle — Off / Balanced / Aggressive. Reduces sample count and expands filter radius at distance to keep performance stable:
Beyond 95% far shadow sampling is skipped entirely.
shadowMapResolution now includes 8192. EXTREME uses 8192 for maximum texel density at 384m. HIGH stays 2048, ULTRA 4096.
New SHADOW_PCSS_BLUR toggle — fixed softness vs PCSS penumbra softening. When enabled, penumbra grows with blocker distance and rain. When disabled, shadows use constant softness.
PCSS correctness fixes in composite.fsh:sampleShadow(): added UV bounds checks (prevents clamp-to-border artifacts), avgBlockerDepth clamped to 1e-4 to avoid NaN, penumbraSize clamped 0-2.0, lightSize reduced 140→40 to prevent light bleeding, actualSpread capped to 16.0, out-of-bounds samples counted as unshadowed (1.0) for correct averaging.
Shadow bias distBias now scales with far instead of shadowDistance, plus extra water receiver bias for tagged water pixels (colortex2.a≈0.8).
🔧 HDR Pipeline Strictness Fix
Dummy #define RGBA16F 0 guards added before the const int colortex*Format = RGBA16F directives. This satisfies strict GLSL validators (C1503 undefined variable RGBA16F) while Iris/OptiFine's parser still reads the format names (spec second clause). In v1.1.1 the directives were inside a /* */ comment and were ignored by some loaders.
Now all used buffers are explicitly RGBA16F: colortex0/1/2 (main HDR + PBR + material tags), colortex3/4/5/6 (unused today but set to HDR for a full pipeline), colortex7 (TAA history, colortex7Clear=false), and optional shadowcolor0/1Format = RGBA16F.
Cost noted: ~16MB per 1080p RGBA16F buffer → ~128MB VRAM for 8 buffers.
🌍 Experimental — Partial Distant Horizons Support (WIP, not full support)
⚠️ AuraLite does NOT yet claim full Distant Horizons compatibility. v1.1.2 only adds a minimal, experimental code path so LOD chunks are no longer invisible under Iris. It's functional enough for testing, but considered partial and work-in-progress.
Why it was needed: Without dh_terrain.vsh/.fsh, dh_water.vsh/.fsh, dh_shadow.vsh/.fsh, Iris marks the pack as incompatible with DH and simply doesn't draw DH's simplified LOD chunks at all — symptom "shader works but DH chunks invisible". Presence of these files is enough for Iris/DH auto-detection (dhShadow.enabled defaults true).
What v1.1.2 does:
dh_terrain/dh_water write the same colortex0/1/2 layout as vanilla passes, so existing lighting/fog/shadow/cloud/godray code in composite.fsh applies to LOD geometry without other changes.
Depth reconciliation in composite.fsh: detects depthtex0>=1.0 && dhDepthTex0<1.0 → isDHTerrain, reconstructs viewPos via dhProjectionInverse (not gbufferProjectionInverse — different far planes) and computes isSkyPixel. Fixes DH terrain being treated as sky (flat/washed-out).
Fog rescale: effectiveDensity *= far/dhRenderDistance prevents exponential fog from saturating to white before DH draw distance.
Emissive fast-path uses !isSkyPixel instead of depth<1.0 so distant DH_BLOCK_ILLUMINATED (glowstone/lanterns) is still emissive.
final.fsh heat shimmer now checks dhDepthTex0 via isRealGeometry so distant lava lakes also shimmer.
Overdraw prevention: if(dist < far+16.0) discard in DH passes — DH renders entire world including area already covered by vanilla chunks; without discard both fight over same G-buffer pixel causing Z-fighting / missing water/ice.
Current limitations (why it's partial):
gl_MultiTexCoord2 is not guaranteed to carry valid lightmap data for DH programs — v1.1.2 hardcodes lmcoord = vec2(0.0,1.0) (open sky, no torch). Correct for exterior DH, but not interior-perfect.
No LabPBR normals/specular maps for DH — roughness/metalness approximated per dhMaterialId (STONE/WOOD/METAL/SNOW/LEAVES/LAVA...). No POM on DH.
Water uses flat vertex normal, not procedurally displaced like near water.
Fog/sky/cloud code paths are shared but DH has coarser geometry.
Ongoing work: proper skylight baking if DH ever exposes it, LabPBR fallback, smoother transition seam, performance tuning. Full support will be announced separately.
🛠️ Pipeline Cleanup & Fixes
Menu split fix — [v1.1.1-ui-hotfix]: Oversized option screens were split into [SHADOW_OPTIONS], [PBR_OPTIONS], [AO_REFLECTIONS], [CLOUD_SHAPE], [LIGHT_SHAFTS], [NIGHT_SKY] because some Iris/OptiFine UI builds silently hide buttons when a screen has too many entries.
Deprecated ftransform() removed from composite.vsh, final.vsh, gbuffers_clouds.vsh, composite1.vsh, composite2.vsh, gbuffers_weather.vsh — replaced with explicit gl_ProjectionMatrix * gl_ModelViewMatrix * gl_Vertex for broader driver compat (same fix applied to shadow.vsh in v1.1.0).
Final pass cleanup: Removed two duplicate copy-pasted post-gamma dither blocks that contradicted the comment about linear-space dither (triangle ±1/255 before tonemap). The single pre-tonemap dither remains — more effective in darks, silent in brights.
Bias & stale comment fixes: Corrected stale colortex6 hand-off comment (removed in v1.0.3), now notes that final.fsh reads normal from colortex2 and roughness from colortex1.z.
Rebalanced profiles to reflect new distances and LOD:
VERY_LOW/LOW 60m (no shadows), MED 120m Balanced, HIGH 256m Balanced, ULTRA 256m Aggressive, EXTREME 384m Aggressive + 8192 res.
Localization: Bumped lang/*.lang headers v1.0.7 → v1.1.2, translated previously-English profile.*.comment placeholders into native languages (ur_pk, vi_vn, zh_cn, zh_hk, zh_tw and others).
🆕 What's New in v1.1.0 — True Volumetric Godrays, HDR Pipeline & Experimental Physical Sky
Version 1.1.0 replaces the screen-space godray approximation with a fully volumetric raymarched implementation, switches the entire G-buffer pipeline to true HDR (RGBA16F), and introduces an experimental, fully physical realtime atmospheric-scattering sky mode as an opt-in alternative to the stable gradient sky. This is a focused two-pillar update on top of the v1.0.7 bug-fix baseline.
🌤️ True Volumetric Godrays
The old computeGodrays() screen-space approximation has been replaced by computeVolumetricGodrays() — a genuine single-scattering volumetric raymarch:
Per-step shadow-map occlusion — every raymarch sample now tests the shadow map individually, so light shafts are actually carved by real geometry (trees, buildings, cave ceilings) instead of being implied by a "forward-looking boost" toward the sun.
Interleaved Gradient Noise dithering (Jimenez 2014), rotated per-frame via the new frameCounter uniform when TAA is active — 8–24 raymarch steps now integrate as smoothly as hundreds, with no banding.
Exact per-segment Beer–Lambert integration — Tr₀ · σs/σt · (1 − e^(−σt·Δx)) per step, which is energy-conserving regardless of step size (no more over-brightening at low sample counts).
Dual-lobe Henyey-Greenstein phase function (forward + weak backscatter lobe) with an isotropic floor, so crepuscular rays stay visible when looking across them, not only when staring directly at the sun.
Colored radiance — shafts are now warm Kelvin-driven sunbeams by day, deep orange at sunset, and faint blue moonbeams at night, instead of a flat white/yellow overlay.
New GODRAYS_STRENGTH setting (Subtle / Balanced / Dramatic) added to every quality profile.
GODRAYS_QUALITY sample counts and distances increased: Fast 8 samples/96m, Balanced 16/128m, High 24/160m (up from 4/72m, 6/110m, 8/150m in v1.0.7).
🌈 Full HDR G-Buffer Pipeline
colortex0, colortex1, and colortex2 are now explicitly RGBA16F. Bright sources — the sun disk, lava, specular highlights, portals — no longer clip to 1.0 before tone mapping, so the ACES/AgX curves in final.fsh finally compress genuine HDR highlights instead of receiving pre-clamped input. Bloom now samples real HDR luminance rather than an already-saturated LDR buffer.
colortex2's alpha channel carries a 5-value material tag (0.0/0.1/0.62/0.8/1.0); RGBA16F guarantees these are preserved exactly, whereas a lower-precision format would have aliased and collided material tags (e.g. foliage vs. water).
Godray intensity constants were re-tuned (roughly halved vs. the old LDR values) now that the additive shaft survives in full instead of clipping against a saturated scene; a stronger soft shoulder (0.50 vs. the old 0.30) keeps the sun-facing core from blowing out under HDR.
🧪 Experimental: Realtime Physical Sky (Off by Default)
A brand-new [EXPERIMENTAL] menu tab exposes an alternate sky renderer in gbuffers_skybasic.fsh, disabled in every shipped profile (SKY_MODE=0) so the stable gradient sky remains the default:
SKY_MODE — 0 (Gradient, legacy v1.0.7-style sky) or 1 (Physical Realtime): a genuine per-pixel ray-marched atmosphere with exact 1st-order single scattering (Rayleigh + Mie + Ozone, full sun-ray optical-depth march with ground-occlusion detection) plus a blue-biased, bounded multiple-scattering ambient term that fills in the zenith/horizon without producing the typical LUT-based "yellow band" artifact. No lookup textures, no cross-frame reads.
SKY_QUALITY — controls raymarch sample counts (Fast 8×4 / Standard 12×6 / High 16×8) for the physical mode.
SKY_STYLE — new artistic-direction toggle independent of SKY_MODE: Realistic (true angular sun/moon size, neutral colors, minimal glow — an authentic astronomy look), Semi-realistic (readable ×2.8 sun/moon size, richer color, soft aureole — the default), or Fantasy (grand ×5.5 sun/moon, huge corona, vivid saturated teal/crimson/indigo palette for a stylized sky).
Physical mode renders the sun disk with real limb darkening and a physically-derived angular radius, and computes its color from actual sun-ray transmittance (ozone-aware) rather than the legacy Kelvin/airmass approximation.
Because this feature is explicitly experimental and disabled by default, it introduces no behavioral change to any existing profile.
🛠️ Smaller Fixes & Cleanup
Dark-sky/moon-halo banding fixed at the source — a linear-space triangle-distributed dither (±1/255, matching the BSL/Complementary technique) is now applied in final.fshbefore tone mapping, where gamma expansion makes a tiny linear noise term large enough in the darks to smooth the gradient, while staying invisible in bright regions. The old post-gamma dither (which couldn't fix pre-tonemap banding) has been removed and replaced with an explicit final clamp().
shadow.vsh no longer relies on the deprecated fixed-function ftransform(); it now builds the clip-space position explicitly via gl_ModelViewMatrix / gl_ProjectionMatrix for broader driver compatibility.
Updated localization strings for GODRAYS, GODRAYS_QUALITY, and the new GODRAYS_STRENGTH / SKY_MODE / SKY_STYLE / SKY_QUALITY options and the new Experimental tab.
🆕 What's New in v1.0.0 — Meteor Showers & Finalized Reflection Pipeline
Version 1.0.0 builds on the volumetric aurora work from v0.3.0 and introduces the first v1.0.0 source snapshot in this repository. The update adds a physically-inspired meteor system to the night sky, finalizes the modern SSR path for reliable Iris compatibility, and refreshes the documentation so the project now correctly points to the shaders v1.0.0/ folder.
☄️ Physically-Based Meteors / Falling Stars
True great-circle sky arcs. Meteors are rendered as moving arcs on the celestial sphere instead of flat 2D streaks, so showers converge toward a shared radiant like real meteor photography.
Ablation-based brightness curve. Each meteor rises, peaks, and fades with a bell-shaped light curve inspired by atmospheric entry.
Blackbody plasma colouring. Meteor heads are tinted with the same Kelvin-based colour pipeline used by AuraLite's sun/moon lighting, giving physically consistent warm-to-white fireball tones.
Moonlight washout and weather attenuation. Faint meteors are suppressed by bright moon phases, rain, and daytime sky brightness, improving realism and avoiding visual clutter in poor visibility.
Persistent trains on bright fireballs. The strongest events leave a short-lived glowing ionization trail, including a subtle green oxygen-style tint on the lingering train.
Available in both Overworld and The End. Overworld meteors respect moonlight and atmosphere; End meteors render against the permanent night sky without moon washout.
🪞 Finalized v1.0.0 SSR / Water Reflection Path
colortex6 fully removed from the reflection workflow. The older MRT export path was retired; final.fsh now reads normals directly from colortex2 and roughness from colortex1, matching AuraLite's already-working PBR data path.
Depth-based water-surface detection. Water is identified by comparing depthtex0 and depthtex1, making reflections robust on Iris paths where water G-buffer writes may be inconsistent.
More stable water normals. Reflection normals are reconstructed from neighbouring depth samples and then perturbed with coherent world-space ripple gradients, reducing faceting and torn reflections.
Cleaner post-pass reliability. The reflection pipeline now lives entirely in the final post-processing pass, simplifying the frame graph and avoiding loader-specific MRT issues.
🎛️ New Sky Settings & Profile Integration
New configurable options: SHOOTING_STARS, SHOOTING_STARS_FREQUENCY, and SHOOTING_STARS_BRIGHTNESS.
Shooting stars are disabled on the lightest presets and enabled from MED upward through the normal profile system.
English and Russian UI text was expanded for the new night-sky controls, while other language files continue to fall back safely.
🆕 Recap — What landed in v0.2.6 — License Migration & Version Support
Version 0.2.6 is a legal protection and compatibility update. It migrates the project license to a copyleft non-commercial model to protect AuraLite from unauthorized commercial redistribution, adds copyright assertions to all source files, and officially expands tested compatibility.
⚖️ License Migration to CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
MIT to CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — Migrated the project's license from MIT to Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International. AuraLite is now legally protected against commercial reuse and unauthorized sales (e.g. on third-party launchers/portals).
Embedded Code Headers — Embedded copyright headers (// AuraLite Shaders - Copyright (c) 2026 AlexanderNyr. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.) into all GLSL shader files (.fsh, .vsh), block properties (.properties), and translation tables (.lang).
Rules & Permissions FAQ — Added a clear FAQ section outlining allowed actions (monetized videos/streaming, inclusion in free CurseForge/Modrinth modpacks) and prohibited actions (commercial sales, paid Patreon redistributions, raw rehosting on ad-supported download hubs).
🎮 Version Compatibility Expansion
Minecraft 26.1.2 Support Verified — Tested and verified to work flawlessly on the latest Minecraft Java hotfix 26.1.2 with Iris + Sodium.
Minecraft 1.16.5 Support Verified — Tested and confirmed to run beautifully on the legendary modding version 1.16.5 (Iris/OptiFine).
✨ Features At A Glance
☁️ 1. Meteorological 3D Volumetric Clouds (Fly-Through!)
AuraLite features a fully physical, flyable 3D cloud system driven by 12-step Raymarching in world coordinates:
True 3D Space: Clouds float at a physical height (configurable base altitude). You can fly up, enter a dense, foggy overcast, and rise above the clouds to see an endless rolling sea of fluffy cumulus clouds.
Camera-Inside-Cloud Veil(v0.2.5): When flying inside the cloud layer, a soft volumetric white/grey fog surrounds the camera.
Independent Wind-Shear Layers(v0.2.5): Each cloud layer (Cirrus, Altocumulus, Altostratus, Cumulus) moves on its own rotated/sheared domain with the WIND_SPEED setting.
Cloud Render Distance(v0.2.5): New 4-step control (Near / Standard / Far / Very Far) — from 3 000 m to 16 000 m horizon-scale decks.
Beer's Law Self-Shadowing: Realistic light absorption makes cloud bottoms dense and dark while cloud tops glow with brilliant white/gold illumination.
Mie Scattering (Silver Lining): Looking towards the sun produces a glowing golden halo around the cloud edges.
Overcast Storms: When raining (/weather rain), the fluffy cumulus clouds automatically expand, darken, and merge into an ominous, heavy Nimbostratus/Cumulonimbus storm deck.
🌠 2. Living Night Sky (since v0.2.0)
The night sky is no longer just a static starfield — it's a fully procedural cosmos:
Aurora Borealis: Realistic, flowing northern lights that ripple across the upper sky. Modes: Disabled / Only in Cold Biomes / Always Enabled, with independent speed and brightness controls. (v0.2.5: rendered in gbuffers_skybasic for reliability; cold-biome detection uses real biome uniforms. v1.0.7: tone softened and high-frequency noise removed — read as a photographic glow rather than oversaturated neon.)
Milky Way Nebula: A subtle diagonal brownish galactic band glows softly above the horizon, with adjustable brightness.
Procedural Stars: Independent brightness and density sliders let you choose between a few crisp pinpricks or a brilliantly dense Hubble-style sky. Stars sparkle and twinkle in real time.
Physically-Based Meteors / Falling Stars(v1.0.0): configurable meteor activity, brightness, moon washout, and persistent ionization trails bring realistic night-sky streaks to the Overworld and the End.
Persistent Rainbow: After rain stops, a soft rainbow arcs across the sky and gently fades out as the wetness uniform decays. Brightness and saturation are configurable.
☀️ 3. Analytical Kelvin Sun & Moon — Enhanced in v0.2.2, refined in v0.2.5
Tanner Helland Blackbody Sun: Sunlight color temperature is dynamically calculated in real time based on the sun's elevation angle using a physically-correct blackbody Kelvin curve (selectable: Cool / Realistic / Warm Golden). This yields photoreal sunrise/sunset colors (~1800K–2200K), warm golden hours (~2800K), and clean crisp white noon light (~5700K–5800K).
Beer-Lambert Atmospheric Extinction: Sunlight intensity dynamically drops as the sun approaches the horizon due to scattering in thick atmospheric masses: $airMass = \frac{1}{\sin(\alpha) + 0.15 \cdot (\alpha_{deg} + 3.885)^{-1.253}}$ This yields incredibly soft, rich, and breathtaking sunset and sunrise golden hour transitions!
Independent Sun & Moon Intensity(v0.2.2): 4-step master sliders let you push the day brighter (Blazing) or sink nights into total darkness (Pitch Night).
Moon Color Temperature(v0.2.2): choose between Icy Blue (cold), Silver (physically accurate 4100K), or Warm Cream (harvest-moon).
Sun Halo (Mie forward-scatter) & Enhanced Sunrise/Sunset Glow(v0.2.2) — warm scattering effects on terrain when looking near the low sun.
🆕 Extended Twilight Window(v0.2.5): Sunset/sunrise lighting stays warm/red at /time set 12800 instead of snapping to neutral.
Crispy Circular Sun & Moon Disks: Custom procedural, perfectly round, anti-aliased sun and moon disks are drawn onto the sky dome with glowing coronas and soft halo scattering.
👥 4. Soft Shadows, Immersive Dark Nights & Cozy Lights — Enhanced in v0.2.2, refined in v0.2.5
Rotated Poisson Disk Soft Shadows(v0.2.2): replaces the old fixed 3×3 PCF kernel. Three quality steps — Sharp / Soft / Ultra Soft — give natural-looking penumbra on shadow maps up to 4096×4096.
🆕 Shadow Slope Bias Fix(v0.2.5): bias now uses raw NdotL to prevent acne artifacts.
Shadow Distance Control(v0.2.2): cap dynamic shadow rendering at 60m / 80m / 120m / 160m for performance or quality tuning.
Shadow Tint(v0.2.2): realistic cool-blue tint for daytime shadows under an open sky (or neutral / warm if you prefer).
Ambient Lift(v0.2.2): control how dark shadowed areas appear at night and in caves.
Light Wrap (Terminator Softness)(v0.2.2): choose physical Lambert, a soft photographic wrap, or a stylized look. (v0.2.5: all profiles default to realistic Lambert.)
🆕 SSAO / SAO Contact Ambient Occlusion(v0.2.5): screen-space darkening in corners and at geometry intersections. Enabled on ULTRA+ profiles.
Deep Dark Nights (2× darker): Night ambient light, moonlight intensity, and fog are reduced by 2× by default to create incredibly atmospheric, immersive nights. Caves and forests are pitch dark, requiring torches for exploration (combine with the new Pitch Night moon preset for extra spice).
Warm Block Lights: Torches, lanterns, and lava emit a cozy golden-amber glow with physically accurate quadratic falloff.
🕯️ Cozy Torch Flickering(since v0.2.0): Real-time flickering animations for torches, campfires, and lanterns add a living, warm atmosphere to your shelters. Held-item light contribution (heldBlockLightValue) is also accounted for.
🌊 5. Physical Fresnel Water & Silver Moonlight Path — Refined in v0.2.5
Fresnel Effect: Water reflectivity is mathematically calculated based on your viewing angle. Looking straight down provides crystal transparency, while looking towards the horizon transitions water into a highly reflective, glossy sheet reflecting the sky dome.
Silver Moonlight Path: Moonlight specular reflection on water ripples has been increased by 4.5×. At midnight, a brilliant silver lunar reflection path shimmers across the waving ocean.
🆕 Unified GGX PBR Water Specular(v0.2.5): Water's old Blinn-Phong specular replaced by composite's GGX microfacet model with proper Fresnel — physically consistent with terrain PBR.
3D Geometric Waves: Vertex shader waves physically displace the water mesh in real-time, and react to rainStrength / thunderStrength for choppier seas during storms.
Independent Ripple & Specular Controls(since v0.2.0): WATER_RIFFLES (Calm / Standard / Choppy) and WATER_SPECULAR_STRENGTH (Soft / Standard / Glinting) can be tuned separately for the perfect water mood.
Zero Feedback Glitches: Designed to be extremely stable, utilizing no feedback-loop depth buffer reads to guarantee bug-free solid rendering on all GPUs.
🌧️ 6. Dynamic Weather Surfaces (since v0.2.0)
Wet Reflections: During rain, solid blocks like grass, dirt, and stone darken and become glossy, picking up sky reflections under open weather. Disables itself under roofs.
Low Ground Mist (Y ≈ 60–70)(refined in v0.2.5): Soft fog sheets drift across water and ice surfaces at dawn and dusk. Uses large slow sheets + small breakup noise with optical distance accumulation for natural-looking radiation fog. Humidity from rain/wetness makes the mist persist longer.
Camera-Inside-Mist Veil(v0.2.5): Standing inside the mist layer produces a subtle whole-view forward-scattering veil.
Thunderstorm Awareness: Shaders distinguish between regular rain and full thunderstorms via the thunderStrength uniform, intensifying cloud darkness and wave chop accordingly.
🌿 7. Lively Foliage
Waving animations for oak/spruce/birch leaves, tall grass, flowers, vines, lily pads, and crops.
Gently animated using hardware-optimized sine waves and time constants.
🧊 Ice fix(since v0.2.0, refined in v1.0.4): regular ice renders with texture + semi-transparency; packed/blue ice renders opaque with texture. All ice types have waving and refraction disabled to eliminate visual glitches.
🪟 Glass rendering(v1.0.4): all glass blocks and panes (including every stained-glass variant and tinted glass) now render with their actual texture and proper transparency via the dedicated translucent terrain pass.
💎 8. Full LabPBR 1.3 Material Support + POM — PBR refined in v0.2.5
3D Normal Maps: Real-time TBN (Tangent-Binormal-Normal) matrices generate true three-dimensional depth on blocks (stone crevices, brick joints) reacting dynamically to light angles.
Specular Reflection (GGX Microfacet): Polished surfaces give sharp glossy glints, while metallic surfaces (gold, copper, iron) tint the specular reflection with the block's native albedo. (v0.2.5: correct NdotL cosine factor added for Cook-Torrance BRDF accuracy.)
🧱 Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM)(since v0.2.0): True per-pixel block relief that pops out of the surface. Configurable POM_DEPTH (1–3) and POM_STEPS (1–4). Disabled in all profiles by default for stability; can be enabled manually. Recommended to keep off on incompatible resource packs.
Seamless Fallback: Falls back automatically to gorgeous flat vanilla textures if no PBR resource pack is active.
🌀 9. Cosmic Nether Portal (since v0.2.0, improved in v0.2.5)
The vanilla Nether portal texture is procedurally transformed into a swirling 3D plasma vortex — animated purple/magenta cosmic energy that pulses with hypnotic depth. Mapped via dedicated block ID 10006 in block.properties. (v0.2.5: portal pixels are flagged as emissive so composite skips scene lighting and displays the plasma as-is.)
🪟 10. Translucent Block Rendering (added in v1.0.4, unchanged in v1.0.6)
AuraLite renders translucent blocks with proper per-block transparency through a dedicated gbuffers_terrain_translucent pass, ensuring correct display on both Iris and Oculus pipelines:
Regular ice — semi-transparent with actual texture; opacity scales with WATER_TRANSPARENCY (Clear / Balanced / Deep).
Packed ice / blue ice / frosted ice — opaque with texture, visually distinct from regular ice.
All glass blocks and panes — every vanilla glass type (clear, all 16 stained variants, pane variants, tinted glass) renders with its actual texture and correct transparency. No more invisible glass against bright skies.
🎬 11. Cinematic Post-Processing — Refined in v1.0.1, v1.0.3
Multiple Tone Mapping Curves(since v0.2.0): Pick from Soft, Filmic (ACES), or Intense (High Contrast) to match your preferred mood.
Color Vibrancy(since v0.2.0): 4-step non-linear saturation control (Muted / Balanced / Colorful / Vivid) that makes foliage glow emerald and skies look lush, without crushing skin tones.
Subtle Vignette: Gentle lens-darkening at screen edges for improved depth and immersion.
🔥 12. Procedural Lava & Heat Shimmer (v1.0.6)
Procedural Magma Surface: Lava and flowing-lava blocks are rendered with a procedural Voronoi crack field, animated convection flow, rare hot spots, and rising bubbles.
3D Parallax Cracks: A 4-step parallax occlusion raymarch gives real depth between the dark basalt crust and glowing magma.
Viscous Vertex Waves: The top face slowly swells with a heavier, slower wave than water, giving a molten feel.
Heat Shimmer:final.fsh applies a subtle screen-space distortion above lava pixels to simulate rising hot air.
PBR-Ready: Rough basalt crust (0.95) and glossy magma cracks (0.02) produce physically plausible highlights.
🛡️ 13. Realistic Atmospheric Fog (v0.2.5)
Fog density now accounts for altitude (aerosol concentration decays with height), horizon path length, and indoor/outdoor exposure via skylight.
Consistent Beer-Lambert distance fog with height-weighted density — no delayed fog walls.
☁️ Cloud Altitude Classification
AuraLite's sky is meteorologically modeled after the international cloud classification system:
AuraLite smoothly transitions these layers based on in-game weather conditions (clearing, rain, or storms).
⚙️ Performance Optimizations (OpenGL 4.6 Native)
AuraLite is built from the ground up for maximum FPS using OpenGL 4.6 native hardware operations:
Multiply-Add Friendly Math: Wave and waving-foliage math is written as simple multiply-add expressions so modern drivers can optimize it efficiently, while avoiding the explicit fma() intrinsic that caused compilation issues on some GPUs / Mesa drivers.
Bitwise Noise Generation: Replacing slow transcendental float functions (fract(sin(dot(...)))) with ultra-fast Integer Bitwise PCG-style hashes utilizing floatBitsToUint and uintBitsToFloat.
No Hand Transparency Glitches: Handheld items, particles, and mobs are rendered in a separate stable path without tangent matrix overhead, eliminating "translucent hand" bugs.
Dead Code Elimination(v0.2.3–v0.2.5): Removed unused noise/fbm functions, dead cloud raymarching code from gbuffers_skybasic, and redundant render calls to reduce GPU compilation time.
Profile-Based Scaling: Every feature (POM, Auroras, SSAO, Cozy Lights, Wet Reflections, Ground Mist, Shadow Distance, Cloud Distance, Sun Halo, etc.) is intelligently distributed across the LOW / MED / HIGH / ULTRA / EXTREME profiles so low-end systems don't pay for effects they can't afford.
🎛️ In-Game Configuration Options
AuraLite includes localized in-game configuration files for 69 language codes, including major European, Asian, American regional variants and compatibility aliases such as fil_ph / tl_ph.
⚠️ Some localization strings may be inaccurate. If something looks strange, compare with the English original.
[Lighting Settings]
Dynamic Shadows — Toggle sun/moon shadows.
Shadow Resolution — 512 / 1024 / 2048 / 4096 / 8192 — real Iris shadowMapResolution const (8192 for EXTREME).
Shadow Distance(v0.2.2, extended in v1.1.2, rebalanced in v1.1.4) — Near (60m) / Standard (80-120m) / DH Seam (192m) / Far (256m) / DH Extended (512m) / DH Far (768m) — fades with SHADOW_LOD; 192/512/768 m give Distant Horizons a useful shadow-map footprint.
Shadow LOD(v1.1.2) — Off / Balanced / Aggressive — reduces samples (32→16→8→4) and expands filter radius at distance.
🆕 Distant Horizons Shadow Range (DH_SHADOW_RANGE)(v1.1.4) — Seam (1.25×) / Extended (2×) / Far (4×) of vanilla far. No effect without Distant Horizons. The DH-specific shadow pass is off by default (dhShadow.enabled=false) to protect vanilla terrain shadows on Iris 1.7.6 + DH 3.2.
🆕 PBR Render Distance (PBR_DISTANCE)(v1.0.3) — Near (16m) / Standard (48m) / Far (128m) / Unlimited — maximum distance for PBR specular calculations. Saves GPU on far terrain.
[Sun & Moon](since v0.2.2)
Sun Intensity — Dim / Standard / Bright / Blazing
Sun Colour Temperature — Cool / Neutral · Realistic (Tanner Helland) · Warm Golden
Sun Halo (Mie Scatter) — toggle the warm forward-scatter glow when looking near the sun.
Enhanced Sunrise/Sunset Glow — toggle stronger warm back-scatter at low sun angles.
Moon Intensity — Pitch Night / Standard / Bright Moon / Full Night
Moon Colour Temperature — Icy Blue / Silver (Realistic 4100K) / Warm Cream
[Foliage Settings]
Waving Leaves — Toggle leaves animation.
Waving Foliage — Toggle grass, flowers, and crops animation.
Wind Speed — Gentle / Breeze / Gale
🆕 Foliage SSS (FOLIAGE_SSS)(v1.0.3) — Subsurface scattering / translucency for leaves and plants (light bleeding when looking toward the sun).
[Water Settings]
Water Waves — Toggle 3D vertex water waves.
Water Density — Clear / Balanced / Deep — Adjust water transparency.
Water Ripple Strength (WATER_RIFFLES) — Calm / Standard / Choppy — Fine normal-map ripples.
Water Specular Glow (WATER_SPECULAR_STRENGTH) — Soft / Standard / Glinting — Brightness of sun/moon highlights on the ripples.
🆕 Water Wave Scale (WATER_WAVE_SCALE)(v0.2.9, spectrum rebuilt in v1.1.4) — Calm / Standard / Choppy / Stormy — Gerstner swell amplitude used by SSR/refraction.
🆕 Water Wave Detail (WATER_WAVE_DETAIL)(v0.2.9, spectrum rebuilt in v1.1.4) — Coarse / Standard / Dense — Gerstner wavelength/capillary density.
🆕 Underwater Night Darkness(v0.2.9) — Moonlit Pool / Dim / True Night / Pitch Dark — controls how dark underwater scenes become at night.
🆕 Water Diagnostics (WATER_DEBUG)(v1.1.3) — developer overlay (Off / Classify / Lightmap / Raw tag alpha) for diagnosing water classification on Iris builds that drop translucent MRT writes. Keep Off in normal play.
[Sky & Clouds]
Volumetric 3D Clouds — Toggle raymarched clouds.
Cloud Altitude — Low (~110m) / Standard (~160m) / High (~240m)
🆕 HDR Bloom (BLOOM / HDR_BLOOM)(v1.0.1, pyramid in v1.1.3, half-res + skippable in v1.1.4) — gaussian-pyramid bloom (composite3–7): threshold brightpass + tight & wide separable gaussian octaves. v1.1.4 runs the chain at half resolution(v1.0.1, pyramid in v1.1.3, half-res + skippable in v1.1.4)_ — gaussian-pyramid bloom (composite3–7): threshold brightpass + tight & wide separable gaussian octaves. v1.1.4 runs the chain at half resolution and skips the five passes entirely when Bloom is off (VERY_LOW/LOW). Strength: Subtle / Balanced / Strong.
🆕 Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA)(v0.2.7, completed in v1.1.3, DH/sky/reactive in v1.1.4) — Halton sub-pixel camera jitter + motion reprojection + YCoCg variance clipping. On by default in HIGH/ULTRA/EXTREME since v1.1.3, off on lighter profiles. v1.1.4 adds DH-correct reprojection, a material reactive mask (water/foliage/emissive) and optional sky temporal resolve.
🆕 TAA Camera Jitter (TAA_JITTER)(v1.1.3) — Off / Subtle / Standard / Strong — sub-pixel Halton camera jitter amplitude (±0.25 / ±0.5 / ±0.75 px) for full sub-pixel reconstruction. Off by default for a steady image; enable it to eliminate high-frequency shimmer. Requires TAA.
🆕 Post-Sharpen (POST_SHARPEN)(v1.1.3) — gentle unsharp mask that recovers texture detail softened by TAA history blending (on in MED+ profiles).
🆕 Sky Temporal Resolve (SKY_TEMPORAL)(v1.1.4) — rotation-only TAA for the sky (on in HIGH+). Requires TAA.
🎚️ Quality Profiles (rebalanced in v1.1.4 — shadows 60–768 m with LOD + DH range; TAA on in HIGH+ since v1.1.3, camera jitter off by default everywhere)
Profile
Target
Shadows
Clouds
Cloud Shadows
Godrays
TAA
SSR
PBR
PBR Dist
AA
SSAO
Heat Shimmer
Heavy Extras
VERY_LOW
Maximum FPS
❌ 512/60m
❌
❌
❌
❌
❌
❌
16m
Off
❌
❌
Most extras off, bloom off
LOW
Weak GPUs
❌ 512/60m
❌
❌
❌
❌
❌
❌
16m
FXAA
❌
❌
Water/foliage motion, stars, vignette
MED
Balanced
✅ 1024/192m
✅ Std
✅ Soft
✅ Fast
❌
✅ F
✅
48m
FXAA
❌
✅ Subtle
Wet refl + ground mist + SSS + bloom
HIGH
High quality
✅ 2048/512m
✅ Far
✅ Balanced
✅ Bal
✅
✅ B
✅
128m
SMAA
✅ Subtle
✅ Balanced
Full atmosphere + SSR + TAA
ULTRA
Very high
✅ 4096/512m Aggr LOD
✅ VFar
✅ Balanced
✅ High
✅
✅ H
✅
128m
SMAA
✅ Balanced
✅ Balanced
High-end visuals + TAA
EXTREME
Max quality
✅ 8192/768m Aggr LOD
✅ Dense
✅ Dramatic
✅ High
✅
✅ H
✅
∞
SMAA
✅ Deep
✅ Strong
Heaviest cinematic + TAA
💫 Shooting stars are disabled on VERY_LOW / LOW and enabled from MED upward. 🌿 Foliage SSS is enabled from MED upward (disabled on VERY_LOW/LOW for maximum FPS). 🔥 Heat shimmer is disabled on VERY_LOW / LOW and enabled from MED upward. ✨ HDR bloom is skipped entirely on VERY_LOW / LOW (since v1.1.4).
🎯 TAA is on by default in HIGH / ULTRA / EXTREME and off on lighter profiles (since v1.1.3). The camera jitter is off by default everywhere — enable TAA_JITTER (Off/Subtle/Standard/Strong) in [Post-Processing & Fog] for full sub-pixel reconstruction; TAA_STRENGTH presets the variance-clip tightness. SKY_TEMPORAL is on in HIGH+ (v1.1.4).
🗺️ Distant Horizons: experimental, partial DH support (introduced in v1.1.2). v1.1.4 replaces the v1.1.3 screen-door seam with a hard far hand-off, adds DH TAA jitter/reprojection, a dedicated illuminated material tag (0.24), and DH_SHADOW_RANGE. The DH-specific shadow pass is off by default to protect vanilla terrain shadows on Iris 1.7.6 + DH 3.2. Still WIP, not full compatibility.
Officially Supported Platform: Minecraft 1.16.5 – 26.2 with Sodium + Iris or OptiFine loader.
Note: Verified to work flawlessly on Minecraft 1.16.5, 1.20.1, 1.21.1, and 26.1.2.
Distant Horizons: v1.1.3 continues experimental, partial DH support (WIP, introduced in v1.1.2) — dh_terrain, dh_water, dh_shadow minimal passes to prevent Iris from hiding LOD chunks, now with a soft screen-door seam at the vanilla↔DH boundary. Provides fog rescaling, depth reconciliation, overdraw culling, emissive/heat-shimmer for distant lava. Still NOT full support: no LabPBR maps for DH, hardcoded full skylight, no POM — full compatibility will be announced separately when ready.
⚖️ Rules & Permissions (FAQ)
Videos & Streams: You are free to showcase, stream, and use this shader in your videos (including monetized channels on YouTube, Twitch, etc.).
Modpacks: You are free to include this shader in your free modpacks on CurseForge, Modrinth, or other platforms.
Personal Tweaks: You can modify the shader code for personal use.
No Re-hosting: Do not upload the raw shader files to third-party sites (especially behind ad links like AdFly). Always use and link to our official, authorized sources below.
Derivative Works: If you modify this shader and distribute it, your version must be free, open-source, and licensed under the exact same CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license with clear attribution to the original author.
