Honeycrisp

Minecraft, rendered natively on Apple Silicon.

Honeycrisp adds a native Apple Metal rendering backend and built-in shaders to Minecraft Java 26.3.

Requirements

• Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer), macOS 15 or later
• Minecraft 26.3, Fabric Loader 0.19.0 or newer, ARM64 Java 25
• Client-side only; Fabric API is not required

On unsupported platforms, Honeycrisp disables itself and Minecraft uses its default renderer.

Features

• Real-time sun and moon shadows, including colored light through stained glass
• Atmospheric mist, light shafts, and a custom sky
• Warm torch lighting and held-item lighting
• Ambient occlusion, waving foliage, and water with waves and screen-space reflections
• Built-in Metal shaders with Off / Low / High quality settings
• Sun-aware cloud lighting and reduced world resolution in Low mode

In a recorded M1 Pro benchmark at 1708×960, render distance 16 and vsync off, median FPS was 95.4 for vanilla OpenGL, 215.7 for Honeycrisp with shaders off, and 191.9 with shaders on. Results vary by hardware, scene and settings.

Installation

Install Fabric for Minecraft 26.3 and put the Honeycrisp JAR in your instance’s mods folder. Use ARM64 Java 25. Optionally add --enable-native-access=ALL-UNNAMED to JVM arguments to silence the native-access warning.

Compatibility and limitations

This is an early beta release. Compatibility with other rendering mods, including Sodium and Iris, has not been verified. OptiFine/Iris shader packs are not supported; Honeycrisp supplies its own Metal shaders. Screen-space effects cannot include geometry outside the camera view.

Choose Off, Low, or High under Options > Video Settings > Quality & Performance > Shaders, then restart Minecraft. Low mode reduces world resolution while keeping the HUD and menus sharp. You can also disable shaders with -Dhoneycrisp.shaders=false, or disable the backend with -Dhoneycrisp.disable=true.

License

Copyright 2026 Richard Qi. Apache License 2.0. Retain the license and NOTICE and mark modified files when redistributing.

Source and feedback

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