Plasma Shader
A deferred shader pack for Minecraft: Java Edition, built from scratch for Iris + Sodium.
Plasma Shader is built around one idea: the lighting should make sense. Sunlight changes as it passes through the atmosphere. Water absorbs light with depth. Clouds scatter and block sunlight. Wet surfaces become smoother. These effects are connected rather than treated as separate visual tricks.
Every shader in the pack is written from scratch using published rendering mathematics. No code from other shader packs is used or adapted.
Written for the OpenGL 3.3 compatibility profile, with no core-profile or Vulkan rendering path required.
Tested on Minecraft 26.3, Iris 1.11.7, and an RTX 3050 (4 GB).
Lighting
The world is rendered into a G-buffer and lit in a deferred pass.
- Cook–Torrance lighting with GGX, Smith correlated visibility, and Schlick Fresnel. Lighting uses per-pixel albedo, normals, roughness, and metalness.
- Atmospheric sunlight. Sun colour comes from atmospheric transmittance, not a sunrise tint. Longer paths through the atmosphere produce redder sunlight, and skylight uses the same transmittance.
- Rayleigh and Mie scattering, with an added multiple-scattering-inspired airlight term to keep the horizon from going unnaturally dark.
- Vanilla lighting preserved. Baked corner and block-to-block shading affects both sunlight and skylight, so block surfaces retain their shape in daylight.
- Coloured block light with configurable colour temperature, plus emissive blocks and illumination from held light sources.
Sky
The sky, clouds, and atmosphere are procedural.
- Clouds: Five octaves of base noise, an erosion layer, directional relief, and self-shadowing along the light direction. Cloud edges soften toward the horizon to account for their apparent distance.
- Stars and Milky Way: A procedural star field with an edge-on galactic band that fades under moonlight.
- Aurora: Procedural curtains positioned along an arc, with a defined lower edge, forward-sca ttered rims, and green oxygen / nitrogen-inspired colours.
