✨ Clarity Shader
| Shader-quality visuals for Minecraft — no shader loader required. |
Real shadows · Reflective water · God rays · Golden sunsets · Coloured lighting
Clarity Shader is a
NeoForge mod that adds post-processing on top of Minecraft's own renderer. You get the look of a shader pack
without installing Iris or OptiFine.
📥 Just drop it in your mods folder and play.
🎨 Features
☀️ Lighting & Atmosphere
- Sun shadows cast by terrain, trees and buildings
- Ambient occlusion, bloom, god rays and distance haze
- Colour grading with a subtle vignette
- Dynamic coloured lighting from held, dropped and placed light sources, glowing mobs and lightning
🌅 Sky
- Golden hour at sunrise and sunset, with an afterglow once the sun has set
- Rainbows after rain
- Lens flare on the sun and a cool glow around the moon
🌊 Water & Weather
- Screen-space reflections, sun glint and ripples
- Underwater caustics, depth tint and wobble
- Wet surfaces and puddles that reflect the sky in the rain and dry up afterwards
💡 Ray-traced Lighting (optional, off by default)
- Light blocks cast coloured light, and some materials get reflections
- Runs as a regular shader on OpenGL and Vulkan, so no RTX card needed
🌍 Dimensions
- Its own visual treatment for the Nether and the End
⚡ Performance
| Feature |
What it does |
| 🎚️ Graphics profiles |
Off, Low, Medium, High, Max, Custom and Auto |
| 🤖 Auto mode |
Adjusts effects and render scale to hold your target FPS (30–240) |
| 🔍 AMD FSR 1 upscaling |
With a sharpness slider, while the HUD stays crisp |
| ⌨️ F6 hotkey |
Cycle through profiles in game |
| 🛡️ Fail-safe shaders |
If a shader fails on your driver, only that effect is turned off and the game keeps running |
📦 Requirements
| Minecraft |
NeoForge |
| 1.21.1 |
21.1.200+ |
| 26.1.2 |
26.1.2.122+ |
| 26.2 |
26.2.0.93+ |
| 26.3 |
26.3.0.99+ |
⚠️ Download the jar that matches your Minecraft version.
🤝 Compatibility
| Mod / API |
Status |
| Sodium (optional) |
✅ Settings get their own page in Sodium's Video Settings |
| Distant Horizons 3.3+ (optional) |
✅ Supported |
| WeatherStory (optional, 26.x) |
✅ Adds cloud shadows |
| Iris |
⚙️ Clarity Shader turns itself off while an Iris shader pack is active |
| Vulkan |
✅ Supported on 26.2 and 26.3 |
⚙️ Settings
You can open the settings in three ways:
- Video Settings → Clarity Shader…
- Sodium's Video Settings page
- NeoForge's mod config screen
💡 Tip: Start with the Auto profile and let Clarity Shader find the right balance for your PC.
🤖 Made with AI
Clarity Shader was developed by
Stefan together with
Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding assistant. A large part of the code and shaders was written with AI help, and
every feature was tested in game before release.
The full source code is
open on GitHub, so anyone can see how it works.
