Ars Skyweave Shader Fix

Ever put down an Ars Nouveau Skyweave Block, loaded up your favourite shaders, and… stared at a big black cube? Yeah. This tiny addon fixes exactly that.

Ars Nouveau draws the Sky Block with its own little custom shader. Iris politely ignores custom shaders when a shaderpack is running, so the block just turns pitch black. This mod steps in and draws the block through the shaderpack's own sky instead — so it actually shows the sky again, shaders and all.

What you get

With a supported shaderpack active, the Sky Block becomes a proper window to the sky:

• Real sky colour straight from your shaderpack (not a fake approximation).
• Clouds, sun, moon and stars shining through the open sides — it genuinely looks like a hole in the world, with the pack's own day/night cycle.
• Correct depth — the open faces occlude properly (no X-ray) and the solid top stays buildable and walkable.
• No shadow cast by the Sky Block itself.

No shaderpack? Nothing changes — you get the normal vanilla effect.

How it works

There are two routes to the same result, and you pick one in the config.

SHADER injects the sky into your shaderpack at runtime, in memory — it never touches the files in your shaderpacks folder. It detects the pack automatically and applies the right patch for that family. Nothing to install into the pack, nothing to reload by hand. This is the route with the long list of tested packs below.

UNIVERSAL is pack-independent and patches nothing at all. The block writes nothing but depth, and every depth texture the pack reads is handed a copy in which the block's own surface sits at the far plane. The pack then paints its real sky onto the faces — clouds included — without a single pack file being touched. Because it needs no per-family support, it can work on packs that will never get a dedicated patch. It is still under test.

Supported shaderpacks (tested)

Temporal Filter / TAA: you can leave the shader's Temporal Filter (TAA) on. The mod tells the pack to reproject the block's faces as sky, which is what used to cause the trailing and the shimmer along the edges. Two packs still need it off (marked TAA off in the table above).

If a pack still smears only on the Sky Block, look for a second, separate temporal setting. Some packs accumulate their clouds over many frames in a pass of their own, with its own option — turning TAA off does nothing for that one. In Photon it sits under Sky → Clouds → Temporal Upscaling, and it has steps rather than just on/off. The mod handles this pass for the supported packs, but if you run into smearing on an unsupported pack while TAA is already off, that's where to look.

EuphoriaPatches note: if you use EuphoriaPatches with Complementary, use a current EuphoriaPatcher version (1.9.3+). Older ones (e.g. 1.8.6) aren't supported (but can work) — the block just stays plain, it won't break anything.

Plenty of other packs that draw their sky the "normal" way happen to work out of the box in SHADER mode too (sky + correct depth) even without a dedicated patch — Sunflawer is one example. Give your pack a try; if the sky and occlusion look right, you're good.

On a pack the mod doesn't know, it checks the pack itself to see whether its sky can be routed through the block at all. If it can't, you get the flat sky-tinted cube rather than a broken-looking block — so an unknown pack degrades quietly instead of showing something wrong.

Packs that genuinely can't do the full window in SHADER mode (pathtracers like SEUS PTGI and Kappa, or packs that build their sky in an unusual way) will show an X-ray effect there: the open faces don't hide what's behind them. That is exactly where UNIVERSAL comes in — it needs no patch and no per-family support, so it is worth trying before writing a pack off.

Config (renderMode)

• SHADER — the real deal, described above. Runtime-injected pack sky (sun/moon/stars/clouds), correct depth, buildable top, no shadow. Use this if your pack is on the list.
• UNIVERSAL — pack-independent, nothing patched: the block substitutes the depth the pack reads, so the pack paints its own sky onto the faces, clouds included. No per-family support needed. Two things to know: the block shows sky on every side, so topMarker has no effect and the top face is sky as well — and if the injection ever fails to take hold, the mod drops to SOLID and says so in the log instead of leaving you an invisible block. Still under test.
• SKYBASIC — a solid block painted by the pack's own sky shader: real sky colour and sun, cleanly hides whatever's behind it. Cheap and stable, but no clouds. On a pack that doesn't draw its sky that way, this quietly falls back to SOLID instead of showing a broken block.
• SOLID — a flat, sky-tinted cube. Cheapest, always works, no frills.

Rule of thumb: pack on the list → SHADER. Pack not on the list, or X-ray in SHADER mode → UNIVERSAL. Want something cheap and clean → SKYBASIC or SOLID.

Finding placed Sky Blocks

Because the open faces blend perfectly into the sky, a placed Sky Block can be almost impossible to spot. So in SHADER mode the top face is given a solid colour (soft lavender by default) — from above it reads as a normal block. You can recolour it or turn it off:

• topMarker — true/false (default true). Has no effect in UNIVERSAL, where every face shows sky.
• topColorR / topColorG / topColorB — 0–255 each. Presets in the config comments (white, magenta, red, cyan, amber, …).

In UNIVERSAL the block is sky from all sides, so the marker cannot help there. Ars Nouveau's own Sense Magic effect shows every Sky Block as a normal textured block, and that works in every mode.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.20.1 (Forge) or 1.21.1 (NeoForge)
• Ars Nouveau
• A shader loader — Oculus on 1.20.1 / Forge, Iris on 1.21.1 / NeoForge (the whole point — without it the vanilla effect is used as-is)