Aetherstone

About

Aetherstone is a stylized Cartoonish shader, built around having beautiful visuals while staying comfortably playable even on integrated graphics. The shader is still under active development.

Aetherstone is not trying to be photorealistic. Its stylized lighting, an (optional) ink outline and cool-tinted shadows give it a painted feel closer to modern stylized RPG games, while offering effects like dynamic shadows, 3D looking water, Physically Based Rendering…

PROFILES

Five profiles, Potato up to Max:

• Potato: The bare essentials only, for the lowest-end hardware.

• Balanced: Most effects on but some left off without ruining visuals, sample counts trimmed.

• Recommended (default): The intended high-FPS experience.

• Pretty: Higher fidelity when FPS headroom exists.

• Max: Every effect at full quality (not much difference to Pretty).

Performance

Start on Recommended and move up or down the list from there. A good way to find the performance and visuals that are good for you, is also to not only change shader settings but also play around with real render distance and Distant Horizons' render distance if you are using DH. On weak hardware I recommend 6-12 real render distance with Distant Horizons turned off, or Distant Horizons 32 render distance and chunk quality on low/medium paired with 4-6 real render distance.

Window Resizing / Resolution Bug Workaround

Changing your window size, toggling fullscreen, or altering screen resolution while the shader is active can cause visual glitching.

Workaround: Simply reload the shader pack. You can do this by opening shader settings and toggling the pack off and back on, or by assigning a hotkey, under:

Options → Controls → Key Binds → scroll down to Iris → ReloadShaders.

Mod support

• Distant Horizons terrain and water render through the shader at LOD range, including the underwater ceiling past the normal render edge. DH's own shadow casting is intentionally not used; the shadow map stays independent of DH by design.

  IMPORTANT: If you run DH alongside this pack, turn off DH's own cloud rendering in its settings (top-left icon in Video Settings) so it doesn't draw over this pack's clouds!!!

• [Physics Mod Pro (Ocean Physics)] (get on Physics Mod creators Patreon for free) full wave support for its ocean.

Installation

Aetherstone requires Iris, and relies on Iris-specific features for some effects, so it is not fully compatible with OptiFine.

• First, install iris and Sodium Iris Sodium to be able to load shader packs.
• Launch the game and open Video Settings → Shader Packs.
• Click the button to open the shaderpacks folder.
• Download Aetherstone and place the zip file in that folder, do not unzip it!!
• Back in the game, select Aetherstone-ByTarkProjects from the shader packs menu.
• In the Shaderpack settings, change profile and individual effects to liking.

Support

If you'd like to support future development: 👉 Ko-fi

A very big Update has released, fixing many major bugs and improving playability, send me an E-mail and give me feedback so I can improve the shader even further: tarkprojectsfeedback@gmail.com