Helion

A next-generation client-side graphics enhancement mod for Minecraft, built natively on Vulkan.
Cinematic ambient occlusion, soft bloom, physical atmosphere, real shadows, and HDR lighting — built for pure fidelity and zero compromises.

⚡ What Makes Helion Different?

Unlike traditional shader packs that wrap around legacy OpenGL pipelines, Helion is built from scratch on Minecraft's modern Vulkan renderer.

With all effects turned off, Helion matches vanilla Minecraft pixel-for-pixel. When enabled, Helion layers modern rendering techniques directly onto the world without altering the core blocky aesthetic.

✨ Core Features

• 🌑 Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion (GTAO):

  • Soft, physically plausible contact shadows in crevices, corners, under stairs, fences, and around mobs.
  • Leaves emissive blocks (lava, torches, lanterns) completely unshadowed.
  • Customizable quality presets (Low, Medium, High, Ultra) and visibility bitmask support.

• 💡 Physically-Inspired Bloom & Tone Mapping:

  • Soft, natural glow around light sources that dynamically adapts to ambient lighting.
  • Khronos PBR Neutral & Filmic tone mapping curves preserve vibrant colors without blowing out highlights.
  • Integrated dithering removes ugly sky color banding.

• 🗡️ Adaptive Sharpening:

  • High-fidelity edge-adaptive sharpening that restores crisp block details on high-resolution displays without ringing artifacts.

• ☀️ Physical Atmosphere & Sun/Moon Shadows (Experimental):

  • Atmospheric Rayleigh/Mie scattering model producing deep overhead blues and natural warm golden sunsets.
  • Dynamic sun and moon shadow maps stretching up to 160 blocks with soft penumbra edges.

• 🔮 HDR Lighting & Geometry Buffer (Experimental):

  • Lights and emissive surfaces unconstrained by the vanilla brightness cap.
  • Per-pixel surface normals, block light, and sky light separation.

• 🎮 Seamless In-Game Controls:

  • Press H at any time to toggle Helion on/off instantly.
  • Deep configuration window powered by the Arkea interface engine, featuring real-time GPU cost estimation and before/after previews.

🛡️ Compatibility & Server Safety

• 100% Client-Side: Completely safe to join any public or private server.
• Requires Vulkan: Runs on Minecraft's official Vulkan graphics backend (Video Settings → Graphics API → Prefer Vulkan).
• Graceful Fallback: If launched on OpenGL, or if Sodium/Iris is detected, Helion steps aside automatically to avoid crashes or conflicts.
• Requires Arkea: Helion's settings window is powered by Arkea. Install Arkea alongside Helion.

📋 Requirements