Fornax

A Vulkan rendering engine for Minecraft, built as a companion to Sodium. Fornax fixes a problem with high-resolution resource packs.

A 256x LabPBR pack can have three textures for every block:

• Colour
• Normal
• Specular

Minecraft normally puts all three into the same atlas. At higher resolutions, the atlas can exceed the hardware limit and the resource pack fails to load.

Fornax stores normal and specular maps in separate atlases. They no longer take space in the main block atlas.

This allows 256x packs to load with their colour, normal, and specular maps intact on low-end devices.

Fornax also provides shaderpack (when paired with the appropriate pack/GLSL) features.

Available Features:

• Deferred rendering
• Declarative render graphs
• LabPBR materials
• Screen-space ambient occlusion
• Screen-space reflections
• Temporal anti-aliasing
• Supersampling
• Configurable shaderpack settings
• Experimental MetalFX frame generation on Apple Silicon
• *macOS on Apple Silicon is currently the only tested platform.

Before installing

• Fornax does not include a shaderpack.
• No shaderpacks have been published yet (TBD and nearly finished for public testing)
• Installing Fornax by itself does not change Minecraft’s visuals. Shaders are disabled until you install and select a compatible Fornax shaderpack.

Fornax shaderpacks use their own format:

• TOML configuration
• GLSL shaders
• Not compatible with shaderpacks made for other loaders

See the pack format documentation. PACK-FORMAT

Requirements

• Minecraft 26.2
• Fabric Loader 0.19.2 or newer
• Sodium 0.9.1 or 0.9.2
• Java 25 or newer
• --enable-native-access=ALL-UNNAMED in your launcher’s JVM arguments

Known limitations

• 256x packs work.
• 512x packs do not work yet (but did yesterday >.>)
• Frame generation is experimental.
• Frame generation requires vsync and adds roughly one frame of latency.
• Very dark surfaces may show occasional bright pixels.
• The bright-pixel issue is still being investigated.
• Only Apple Silicon Macs have been tested so far.

Development

Fornax was built by one person over roughly two months, with AI used to assist with code and assets.

Any AI generated code was reviewed, modified, or rejected as needed through thorough testing and validation.

The architecture, design decisions, tuning, and acceptance tests were done and reviewed by the developer. Generated code was reviewed, modified, or rejected as needed.