🌌 AuraLite Shaders (Minecraft 1.16 – 26.2)

AuraLite is a modern, lightweight, and highly optimized shader pack built on top of the OpenGL 4.6 / GLSL 460 standard. It is specifically designed and tested for Minecraft 1.16 – 26.2 with Sodium + Iris (and compatible with OptiFine, Oculus).

AuraLite delivers a breathtaking, realistic visual experience without overcomplicating the screen with bloated post-processing effects (such as aggressive motion blur or heavy bloom). A lightweight HDR bloom was added in v1.0.1 to softly glow emissive sources without smearing the scene. Optional FXAA/SMAA anti-aliasing, SSR, TAA, godrays, and SSAO are profile-scaled so AuraLite keeps high FPS and smooth frametimes on modern GPUs.

ℹ️ Historical note: older changelog sections below are preserved as original release notes.

🛠️ What's New in v1.1.1 — Pipeline Correctness Fix

Version 1.1.1 is a focused bug-fix release for the v1.1.0 codebase. It keeps the visual design intact while fixing configuration and runtime issues found in the shader pipeline:

Moved HDR/TAA buffer directives to GLSL const directives so colortex0/1/2/7 formats and persistent TAA history are actually applied by Iris/OptiFine.
Replaced the custom SHADOW_RES/SHADOW_DISTANCE menu controls with real shadowMapResolution and shadowDistance pipeline constants.
Fixed Nether/End dimension fallback detection so a default dimension=0 cannot override biome/fog-based Nether/End detection.
Retuned shadow bias to a balanced value with extra water receiver bias: fixes low-sun Peter Panning while cleaning remaining Shadow Acne on water/ice surfaces.
Made underwater caustics and ground-mist sheets world-stable by using cameraPosition-corrected world coordinates.
Added performance-neutral height-aware pseudo-3D cloud noise: same ray steps/noise calls, but cloud density now changes through Y instead of looking like flat 2D sheets.
Added WET_REFLECTIONS to the menu and wired it into final-pass SSR wetness.
Added profile-scaled SKY_QUALITY, removed physical-sky hash-noise by switching to centred higher-sample raymarching, fixed SKY_STYLE grading so it affects only the base sky, restored readable sun/moon sizes in gradient sky, and corrected moonbow direction.
Fixed emissive-surface cloud lighting, added a safe fallback for unknown tagged translucent blocks, removed the empty translation submenu, made TAA default-off as a standard user toggle, and synced waving vegetation displacement in the shadow pass.
Forced vanilla Minecraft clouds off via clouds=false and added gbuffers_clouds discard shaders as a fallback, so AuraLite's procedural clouds do not overlap with default clouds.
Added gbuffers_weather to make vanilla rain/snow streaks less dense and more transparent by default.
Added explicit opaque entity/hand passes to prevent players, mobs and held items from appearing semi-transparent.

🆕 What's New in v1.1.0 — True Volumetric Godrays, HDR Pipeline & Experimental Physical Sky

Version 1.1.0 replaces the screen-space godray approximation with a fully volumetric raymarched implementation, switches the entire G-buffer pipeline to true HDR (RGBA16F), and introduces an experimental, fully physical realtime atmospheric-scattering sky mode as an opt-in alternative to the stable gradient sky. This is a focused two-pillar update on top of the v1.0.7 bug-fix baseline.

🌤️ True Volumetric Godrays

The old computeGodrays() screen-space approximation has been replaced by computeVolumetricGodrays() — a genuine single-scattering volumetric raymarch:

Per-step shadow-map occlusion — every raymarch sample now tests the shadow map individually, so light shafts are actually carved by real geometry (trees, buildings, cave ceilings) instead of being implied by a "forward-looking boost" toward the sun.
Interleaved Gradient Noise dithering (Jimenez 2014), rotated per-frame via the new frameCounter uniform when TAA is active — 8–24 raymarch steps now integrate as smoothly as hundreds, with no banding.
Exact per-segment Beer–Lambert integration — Tr₀ · σs/σt · (1 − e^(−σt·Δx)) per step, which is energy-conserving regardless of step size (no more over-brightening at low sample counts).
Dual-lobe Henyey-Greenstein phase function (forward + weak backscatter lobe) with an isotropic floor, so crepuscular rays stay visible when looking across them, not only when staring directly at the sun.
Colored radiance — shafts are now warm Kelvin-driven sunbeams by day, deep orange at sunset, and faint blue moonbeams at night, instead of a flat white/yellow overlay.
New GODRAYS_STRENGTH setting (Subtle / Balanced / Dramatic) added to every quality profile.
GODRAYS_QUALITY sample counts and distances increased: Fast 8 samples/96m, Balanced 16/128m, High 24/160m (up from 4/72m, 6/110m, 8/150m in v1.0.7).

🌈 Full HDR G-Buffer Pipeline

colortex0, colortex1, and colortex2 are now explicitly RGBA16F. Bright sources — the sun disk, lava, specular highlights, portals — no longer clip to 1.0 before tone mapping, so the ACES/AgX curves in final.fsh finally compress genuine HDR highlights instead of receiving pre-clamped input. Bloom now samples real HDR luminance rather than an already-saturated LDR buffer.
colortex2's alpha channel carries a 5-value material tag (0.0/0.1/0.62/0.8/1.0); RGBA16F guarantees these are preserved exactly, whereas a lower-precision format would have aliased and collided material tags (e.g. foliage vs. water).
Godray intensity constants were re-tuned (roughly halved vs. the old LDR values) now that the additive shaft survives in full instead of clipping against a saturated scene; a stronger soft shoulder (0.50 vs. the old 0.30) keeps the sun-facing core from blowing out under HDR.

🧪 Experimental: Realtime Physical Sky (Off by Default)

A brand-new [EXPERIMENTAL] menu tab exposes an alternate sky renderer in gbuffers_skybasic.fsh, disabled in every shipped profile (SKY_MODE=0) so the stable gradient sky remains the default:

SKY_MODE — 0 (Gradient, legacy v1.0.7-style sky) or 1 (Physical Realtime): a genuine per-pixel ray-marched atmosphere with exact 1st-order single scattering (Rayleigh + Mie + Ozone, full sun-ray optical-depth march with ground-occlusion detection) plus a blue-biased, bounded multiple-scattering ambient term that fills in the zenith/horizon without producing the typical LUT-based "yellow band" artifact. No lookup textures, no cross-frame reads.
SKY_QUALITY — controls raymarch sample counts (Fast 8×4 / Standard 12×6 / High 16×8) for the physical mode.
SKY_STYLE — new artistic-direction toggle independent of SKY_MODE: Realistic (true angular sun/moon size, neutral colors, minimal glow — an authentic astronomy look), Semi-realistic (readable ×2.8 sun/moon size, richer color, soft aureole — the default), or Fantasy (grand ×5.5 sun/moon, huge corona, vivid saturated teal/crimson/indigo palette for a stylized sky).
Physical mode renders the sun disk with real limb darkening and a physically-derived angular radius, and computes its color from actual sun-ray transmittance (ozone-aware) rather than the legacy Kelvin/airmass approximation.
Because this feature is explicitly experimental and disabled by default, it introduces no behavioral change to any existing profile.

🛠️ Smaller Fixes & Cleanup

Dark-sky/moon-halo banding fixed at the source — a linear-space triangle-distributed dither (±1/255, matching the BSL/Complementary technique) is now applied in final.fsh before tone mapping, where gamma expansion makes a tiny linear noise term large enough in the darks to smooth the gradient, while staying invisible in bright regions. The old post-gamma dither (which couldn't fix pre-tonemap banding) has been removed and replaced with an explicit final clamp().
shadow.vsh no longer relies on the deprecated fixed-function ftransform(); it now builds the clip-space position explicitly via gl_ModelViewMatrix / gl_ProjectionMatrix for broader driver compatibility.
Updated localization strings for GODRAYS, GODRAYS_QUALITY, and the new GODRAYS_STRENGTH / SKY_MODE / SKY_STYLE / SKY_QUALITY options and the new Experimental tab.

🆕 What's New in v1.0.7 — Comprehensive Bug Fix, Stability & Aurora Refinement Update

Version 1.0.7 conducts a deep code audit across the entire GLSL 460 pipeline to resolve rendering anomalies, feedback loops, and multi-pass inconsistencies introduced in earlier releases, and additionally refines the Aurora Borealis to remove high-frequency visual noise while softening its overall luminance.

🐞 Bug Fixes & Architectural Polish

Massive Volumetric Cloud, Godray & Aurora FPS Bottleneck Resolved
Underwater Screen-Space Ripple Distortion Feedback Loop Fixed — Removed legacy underwater ripple screen distortion from composite.fsh (where it erroneously sampled raw unlit G-buffer albedo colortex0 and mixed unshaded texels into the lit scene). Moved clean underwater screen-space view perturbation directly into final.fsh, sampling the fully lit, composited, and TAA-resolved scene.
Glass & Ice Water Refraction / Reflection Distortion Fixed — Solved a multi-target G-buffer collision where stained glass windows and ice blocks triggered the depth-comparison detector (depthS - depth) > 1e-5 in final.fsh. Added a dedicated material alpha tag colortex2.a = 0.8 for water in gbuffers_water and gbuffers_terrain_translucent, ensuring glass windows (1.0) and ice blocks (1.0) never receive underwater refraction ripples or wavy water SSR reflections.
Procedural Lava POM Coordinate Discard Fixed — Standardized the 4-step Parallax Occlusion Mapping loop in gbuffers_water.fsh and gbuffers_terrain_translucent.fsh to match gbuffers_terrain.fsh. Displaced UV coordinates p = currentTexCoords are now properly retained across the entire shader block for crack height calculations, temperature gradients, hotspots, and rising bubbles.
Unnormalized Lava Normal Output Fixed — Normalized the G-buffer normal output normalize(normal) in gbuffers_terrain.fsh before encoding into colortex2, preventing interpolated vector length drift across triangle interiors.
Camera-Inside Volumetric Fog, Ground Mist & Valley Sheets Fixed — In getInsideGroundMistVeil(), applyInsideCloudVeil(), and distant ground mist sheet rendering, fixed the exponential absorption rate (lowered from 0.014/0.0105 to 0.0018/0.0035) and removed hardcoded blanket opacity ceilings (0.30/0.34). Wired the user's FOG_DENSITY_LEVEL setting directly into volume optical thickness. Added a smooth attenuation factor (1.0 - camMistHere * 0.95) to distant 2D sheets when standing inside the ground mist layer, preventing double-accumulation with the screen-space volumetric veil.
PCSS Blocker Search Self-Shadow Acne Fixed — Updated the blocker depth comparison threshold in composite.fsh from a static 1e-4 epsilon to the dynamic surface slope bias (bias). Sloped terrain no longer detects itself as a false shadow occluder.
POM Division-By-Zero NaN Fixed — In getParallaxCoords(), changed the ray hit weight denominator from (afterDepth - beforeDepth + 0.0001) to min(afterDepth - beforeDepth, -1e-5). Since afterDepth - beforeDepth is strictly negative, adding +0.0001 mathematically cancelled out the denominator to zero on subtle step transitions, causing black dot NaN artifacts.
POM Optical View Angle Cotangent Scaling & Limiting Added — Scaled tangent-space UV step offsets by V_tang.xy / max(abs(V_tang.z), 0.15) across all POM passes. Parallax crack depth now physically stretches when viewed at grazing angles instead of flattening out.
Procedural Lava Sub-Step POM Linear Interpolation Added — Replaced the discrete sub-step endpoint p = currentTexCoords in the lava POM loop with exact linear interpolation mix(currentTexCoords, prevTexCoords, weight). Internal crack walls no longer suffer from 4-step banding/stepping artifacts.
Block Mapping Extended — Added minecraft:magma_block to block ID 10009 in block.properties, granting overworld and nether magma blocks dynamic procedural glowing Voronoi cracks.

🌌 Aurora Borealis Refinement — Smoother & Softer

The volumetric Aurora in gbuffers_skybasic.fsh was producing subtle high-frequency "static" patterns and reading slightly oversaturated on bright presets. The shader pass has been retuned in this release:

Dither offset re-centered and weakened — Replaced the 0..1 per-pixel ray start offset with a centered -0.5..+0.5 range scaled down to 0.6 × dt. Adjacent pixels now sample closer ray distances, eliminating the flickering pattern that read as visual noise.
Vertical ray frequency lowered (32.0 → 14.0) — The single very-high-frequency sin(uv.x × 32) that powered the striations aliased into thin static-like lines. Two slightly offset waves (14.0 + 9.0) are now blended together with mix(0.5) to break the periodic aliasing while preserving the characteristic vertical pillar look.
Ray sharpness softened (3.0 → 1.8) and amplitude reduced (2.0 → 1.3) — Pillars no longer have harsh, sharp edges; they blend smoothly into the curtain ribbon.
Curtain ribbon exponent softened (5.0 → 3.5) and weight lowered from 0.5 to 0.45 — Lighter, more atmospheric curtains without the blocky stripe artifacts the high power was producing.
Spatial color variation slowed down — sin(worldDir.x × 3.5 + worldDir.z × 2.8) × 0.2 → sin(worldDir.x × 2.2 + worldDir.z × 1.7) × 0.18. Color shifts across the sky are now gradual instead of rapid.
Photographic palette toned down (~30% dimmer):
- Cyan-Green: (0.0, 0.80, 0.50) → (0.0, 0.55, 0.32)
- Magenta/Purple: (0.60, 0.10, 0.70) → (0.42, 0.08, 0.50)
- Deep Blue (upper edge): (0.05, 0.10, 0.50) → (0.04, 0.08, 0.35)
Optical depth scaling lowered (0.35 → 0.26) and final intensity multiplier × 0.78 — Overall accumulation is roughly 35–40% softer than the v1.0.7 original. The AURORA_STRENGTH profile setting still controls user-level intensity on top.

The aurora now reads as a soft, glowing, photographic northern light rather than an over-saturated neon stripe pattern. No menu changes; no new options; no profile changes. All existing AURORA_MODE, AURORA_SPEED, and AURORA_STRENGTH settings behave as before.

🆕 What's New in v1.0.6 — Procedural Lava & Heat Shimmer

Version 1.0.6 adds a physically-inspired procedural lava block renderer and a subtle heat-shimmer post-processing effect. It is a focused visual update on top of v1.0.5.

🔥 Procedural Lava / Magma (Block ID 10009)

Block mapping — minecraft:lava and minecraft:flowing_lava are now tagged with block ID 10009 in block.properties.
3D Voronoi cracks — the surface is generated with a procedural Voronoi crack field (basalt crust on top, glowing magma in the cracks) using a 4-step parallax occlusion raymarch for real depth.
Animated convection flow — slow noise-driven convection makes the magma crawl and pulse.
Localized hot spots & bubbles — rare high-contrast yellow-orange hot spots and short-lived rising bubbles add life without turning the surface into noise.
Viscous waves — only the top face receives a slower, heavier vertex displacement so lava feels thick and molten.
PBR-ready — the basalt crust is rough (0.95) while the magma cracks are extremely glossy (0.02), giving physically plausible highlights.
Multi-pass coverage — lava is handled in gbuffers_terrain, gbuffers_water, and gbuffers_terrain_translucent so it renders correctly on both Iris and Oculus pipelines regardless of which pass the loader assigns fluid blocks to.

🌡️ Heat Shimmer Above Lava

final.fsh detects lava pixels through a dedicated colortex2 alpha signature (0.1) and applies a subtle, slow screen-space distortion that simulates rising hot air.
The effect is constrained by depth and by the lava mask, so it only affects pixels directly above or next to lava surfaces.
New in-game options: HEAT_SHIMMER (on/off) and HEAT_SHIMMER_STRENGTH (Subtle / Balanced / Strong), located in the [Post-Processing & Fog] menu.

🆕 What's New in v1.0.5 — Expanded Localization

Version 1.0.5 is a localization-focused release that adds 10 new in-game languages, bringing the total to 69 supported locales. No shader logic, profile defaults, or rendering behavior was changed — this is a pure translation / metadata update on top of v1.0.4.

🌐 New Languages

The following fully-translated .lang files were added (every option name, value label, profile name and tooltip — 289 keys each, 100% key parity with the English source):

Code	Language	Code	Language
`gl_es`	Galician	`sw_ke`	Swahili
`ga_ie`	Irish	`nn_no`	Norwegian Nynorsk
`gd_gb`	Scottish Gaelic	`tt_ru`	Tatar
`af_za`	Afrikaans	`hy_am`	Armenian
`az_az`	Azerbaijani	`zh_hk`	Cantonese (Hong Kong)

As with all non-English locales, the in-game ⚠ Translations may contain errors notice applies — some strings in rarer languages may be imperfect; compare with the English original if anything looks off.
No shader logic, profile defaults, or rendering behavior changed in this release — v1.0.5 is purely a localization / metadata refresh on top of v1.0.4.
README.md, installation references, and source-folder notes updated to v1.0.5.
shaders.properties and block.properties metadata headers updated to v1.0.5.
Source-folder snapshots now run through shaders v1.0.5/.

🆕 What's New in v1.0.4 — Profile Rebalance, Translucent Blocks & Glass Rendering

Version 1.0.4 delivers a full quality-profile rebalance for smoother progression, introduces proper translucent block rendering for ice and glass, adds a dedicated Iris/Oculus translucent terrain pass, and fixes a cross-vendor GLSL compatibility issue.

🔄 Full Profile Rebalance

All six quality profiles (VERY_LOW → EXTREME) have been rebalanced for a smoother, more logical feature progression:

Profile	Key Changes in v1.0.4
VERY_LOW	Sun intensity lowered to Dim (1), underwater night set to Moonlit Pool for visibility.
LOW	Ambient brightness lowered, cozy lights disabled, Filmic tone mapping (ACES), underwater night set to Dim. Stars upgraded to Standard.
MED	Godrays now enabled (Fast quality) — this was the biggest missing piece in the sweet-spot preset. PBR strength raised to Standard. Meteor frequency normalized.
HIGH	SSAO now enabled (Subtle) — contact shadows appear at this tier. Godrays bumped to Balanced. Moon intensity lowered to Standard.
ULTRA	Godrays raised to High. TAA strength at Balanced.
EXTREME	Water wave scale pushed to Stormy. Underwater night set to Pitch Dark for maximum survival realism. Photographic (AgX) tone mapping.

🧊 Split Ice & Glass Block Rendering

Regular ice (minecraft:ice, block ID 10005) now renders with its actual texture and semi-transparency instead of being fully opaque. Transparency scales with the WATER_TRANSPARENCY setting (Clear / Balanced / Deep).
Packed ice, blue ice, and frosted ice (block ID 10007) are now rendered opaque with texture — distinct from regular ice so the visual difference is clear.
All glass blocks and panes (block ID 10008), including every stained-glass variant and tinted glass, now render with their actual texture and proper transparency. Glass opacity scales with WATER_TRANSPARENCY. This eliminates the old "invisible glass" problem where glass blocks disappeared against bright skies.
Both ice types and glass are handled by the new gbuffers_terrain_translucent pass, ensuring correct rendering on Iris/Oculus split-translucent pipelines.

🪟 New Translucent Terrain Pass (`gbuffers_terrain_translucent`)

A new gbuffers_terrain_translucent.fsh / .vsh shader pair was added. This pass handles water, ice, glass, and nether-portal blocks in a single Iris/Oculus-compatible translucent terrain path.
Mirrors the existing gbuffers_water.fsh logic so translucent blocks render identically regardless of whether the loader uses a unified or split translucent G-buffer path.
Nether portal plasma, ice Fresnel, glass opacity, and water Fresnel/ripples all route through this pass.

🛠️ GLSL Compatibility Fix

Replaced all fma() calls with direct multiply-add expressions across every shader file. The fma() intrinsic, while correct on most modern GPUs, caused compilation failures on certain drivers (particularly older Intel iGPUs and some Mesa versions). The replacement a * b + c expressions are mathematically equivalent and compile universally.

🆕 What's New in v1.0.3 — Anti-Aliasing & PBR Performance

Version 1.0.3 adds configurable spatial anti-aliasing (FXAA / SMAA) and a PBR render distance control that skips expensive Cook-Torrance specular calculations on distant terrain.

🖼️ Spatial Anti-Aliasing (FXAA / SMAA)

SPATIAL_AA_MODE — new toggle in the [Post-Processing] menu with 3 modes:
- Off — no spatial AA (TAA-only or nothing).
- FXAA — Fast Approximate AA. Sobel gradient-directed edge detection with conservative blend weights. Cheap and effective.
- SMAA — Subpixel Morphological AA. Combines luminance Sobel gradient with depth discontinuity detection for superior edge detection on geometry where luma contrast is low. Slightly more expensive than FXAA.
Both modes operate in linear space before tone mapping and are conservative enough to avoid washing out the image (max blend weight 0.15–0.18, high edge thresholds).
Freely combinable with TAA (composite1 pass) for temporal + spatial smoothing.
Added to all 6 quality profiles: VERY_LOW=Off, LOW/MED=FXAA, HIGH/ULTRA/EXTREME=SMAA.

⚡ PBR Render Distance

PBR_DISTANCE — new setting in the [Lighting Settings] menu with 4 levels:
- Near (16m) — PBR specular only on very close surfaces. Maximum GPU savings.
- Standard (48m) — balanced distance. Default for LOW/MED profiles.
- Far (128m) — extended range. Default for HIGH/ULTRA profiles.
- Unlimited — no distance limit. EXTREME profile only.
Beyond the fade range, the entire Cook-Torrance BRDF block (GGX distribution, Smith geometry, Fresnel-Schlick) is completely skipped via early-out — no wasted ALU on sub-pixel specular.
Fade is smooth (smoothstep between start and end distance) to avoid visible pop-in.

🌐 Localization

Full English and Russian localization for both new settings (option names + value labels).
Other language files fall back to English labels.

🌿 Foliage Subsurface Scattering (also finalized in v1.0.3)

FOLIAGE_SSS — toggle in the [Foliage Settings] menu. Enables light bleeding through leaves and plants when looking toward the sun, plus a soft wrap term for the shaded side. Controlled per-profile (enabled from MED upward by default). Uses material ID tagging in gbuffers_terrain and a dedicated SSS pass in composite.fsh.
Added to all quality profiles (VERY_LOW → EXTREME) with the !FOLIAGE_SSS or FOLIAGE_SSS flag.
Full English + Russian localization strings added.

older changelog sections below are preserved as original release notes.

Version 1.0.2 adds realistic subsurface scattering for vegetation, making leaves, grass, and plants look more translucent and lifelike when light shines through them. This is a focused visual enhancement that integrates cleanly with the existing PBR and lighting pipeline.

🌿 New Feature

Foliage Subsurface Scattering (FOLIAGE_SSS) — New toggle in the [Foliage Settings] menu. When enabled, foliage receives additional lighting from the back (light bleeding) and a soft wrap term for the unlit side. Controlled per-profile (enabled from MED upward by default). Uses material ID tagging in gbuffers_terrain and a dedicated SSS pass in composite.fsh.
Added to all quality profiles (VERY_LOW → EXTREME) with the !FOLIAGE_SSS or FOLIAGE_SSS flag.
Full English + Russian localization strings added.

🆕 What's New in v1.0.1 — Stability, HDR Bloom & Photographic Tone Mapping

Version 1.0.1 is a focused hotfix on top of v1.0.0 that addresses five edge-case rendering issues and introduces a new cinematic tone-mapping curve with lightweight HDR bloom.

🛠️ Bug Fixes

TAA history acceptance threshold. Added historySample.a < 0.99 guard in composite1.fsh so uninitialised or stale history buffers (e.g. right after shader reload or resolution change) are rejected instead of causing ghosting.
Vibrancy math. applyVibrancy in final.fsh now correctly handles negative saturation values — oversaturation works as intended rather than relying on undefined GLSL mix extrapolation followed by hard clamping.
SSR normal NaN guard. Added length(N) > 0.5 check before traceSSR() so invalid normals from edge pixels are silently skipped instead of producing black reflections.
SSR near-field trace precision. Minimum raymarch step lowered from 1.0 to 0.3 view-space units, dramatically improving hit rate on close surfaces (ripples, shallow pools, wet stone).
Meteor moon-brightness curve. gbuffers_skybasic.fsh now uses cos²(phase × π/8) — identical to getMoonPhaseBrightness() in composite.fsh — so moon washout is physically consistent.

🎨 Visual Enhancements

HDR Bloom (v1.0.1). Cheap single-pass 3×3 neighbour blur for overbright pixels (luminance threshold 0.75). Naturally affects sun/moon disks, lava, portals, bright specular highlights, and torches — without smearing the entire scene or requiring extra render targets.
Photographic (AgX-like) Tone Mapping (v1.0.1). A new CONTRAST = 4 option in final.fsh provides a sigmoidal tone curve with natural highlight chromatic attenuation, soft toe, and lifted blacks — giving a cinematic, non-clipped look that keeps foliage saturation under control while handling extreme brightness gracefully.
EXTREME profile updated. Now uses CONTRAST=4 (Photographic/AgX-like) instead of CONTRAST=3 for cinematic highlight handling.

🆕 What's New in v1.0.0 — Meteor Showers & Finalized Reflection Pipeline

Version 1.0.0 builds on the volumetric aurora work from v0.3.0 and introduces the first v1.0.0 source snapshot in this repository. The update adds a physically-inspired meteor system to the night sky, finalizes the modern SSR path for reliable Iris compatibility, and refreshes the documentation so the project now correctly points to the shaders v1.0.0/ folder.

☄️ Physically-Based Meteors / Falling Stars

True great-circle sky arcs. Meteors are rendered as moving arcs on the celestial sphere instead of flat 2D streaks, so showers converge toward a shared radiant like real meteor photography.
Ablation-based brightness curve. Each meteor rises, peaks, and fades with a bell-shaped light curve inspired by atmospheric entry.
Blackbody plasma colouring. Meteor heads are tinted with the same Kelvin-based colour pipeline used by AuraLite's sun/moon lighting, giving physically consistent warm-to-white fireball tones.
Moonlight washout and weather attenuation. Faint meteors are suppressed by bright moon phases, rain, and daytime sky brightness, improving realism and avoiding visual clutter in poor visibility.
Persistent trains on bright fireballs. The strongest events leave a short-lived glowing ionization trail, including a subtle green oxygen-style tint on the lingering train.
Available in both Overworld and The End. Overworld meteors respect moonlight and atmosphere; End meteors render against the permanent night sky without moon washout.

🪞 Finalized v1.0.0 SSR / Water Reflection Path

colortex6 fully removed from the reflection workflow. The older MRT export path was retired; final.fsh now reads normals directly from colortex2 and roughness from colortex1, matching AuraLite's already-working PBR data path.
Depth-based water-surface detection. Water is identified by comparing depthtex0 and depthtex1, making reflections robust on Iris paths where water G-buffer writes may be inconsistent.
More stable water normals. Reflection normals are reconstructed from neighbouring depth samples and then perturbed with coherent world-space ripple gradients, reducing faceting and torn reflections.
Cleaner post-pass reliability. The reflection pipeline now lives entirely in the final post-processing pass, simplifying the frame graph and avoiding loader-specific MRT issues.

🎛️ New Sky Settings & Profile Integration

New configurable options: SHOOTING_STARS, SHOOTING_STARS_FREQUENCY, and SHOOTING_STARS_BRIGHTNESS.
Shooting stars are disabled on the lightest presets and enabled from MED upward through the normal profile system.
English and Russian UI text was expanded for the new night-sky controls, while other language files continue to fall back safely.

🆕 What's New in v0.3.0 — Volumetric Aurora Realism Update

Version 0.3.0 focuses on the night sky and replaces the older flat aurora overlay with a more photographic, volumetric aurora renderer. The rest of the rendering pipeline remains based on the stable v0.2.9 SSR/water foundation.

🌌 Realistic Volumetric Aurora Borealis

Raymarched aurora curtains. Aurora rendering now samples a vertical volume above the horizon instead of drawing a simple 2D noise layer, giving the effect visible depth and height.
Distinct vertical pillars and rays. Fine high-frequency striations create the characteristic upward beams seen in real aurora photography.
Sharper lower edge, softer upper fade. The aurora now has a defined luminous base and gradually dissolves into the upper night sky.
More vivid photographic colours. The palette was rebalanced toward saturated cyan-green, magenta/purple, and subtle deep-blue upper blending.
Better motion pacing. Animation speed was reduced and smoothed so curtains drift naturally instead of sliding too quickly across the sky.
Preserved biome/weather logic. Existing AURORA_MODE, cold-biome detection, rain attenuation, speed, and brightness settings continue to work.

🆕 What's New in v0.2.9 — Working SSR, Realistic Waves & True Night Underwater

Version 0.2.9 is a focused water-quality update that finally delivers the long-requested screen-space reflections that work on every loader (including the tricky Iris 1.20+ pipeline), introduces physically-coherent procedural waves that don't tear reflections, and gives underwater scenes true nocturnal darkness.

🪞 Screen-Space Reflections (SSR) — Now Actually Working

Loader-agnostic SSR pipeline. Previous SSR implementations relied on multi-render-target writes via DRAWBUFFERS:06 + layout(location = 1) out. This combination silently failed on Iris 1.20 — the second attachment was never bound to the FBO, so reflection data was lost between the composite and final passes. v0.2.9 reads the surface normal directly from colortex2 and roughness from colortex1.z (the same buffers PBR specular highlights already use), bypassing the broken MRT path entirely.
Bulletproof water detector. Water surfaces are now identified by comparing depthtex0 (depth with translucents) and depthtex1 (depth without translucents). When they differ, the pixel is a water/glass/ice surface — no false positives on lapis lazuli, blue wool, packed ice, or terrain seen through water. Works regardless of whether gbuffers_water correctly writes its G-buffer attachments.
dFdx-stabilized normal reconstruction. For pixels where gbufferModelView is identity in the final pass (a known Iris quirk), the water normal is rebuilt from depth-buffer derivatives using a 4-tap central-difference kernel. The result is the true geometric normal of the visible water surface, independent of any matrix uniforms.
Schlick-correct Fresnel. Reflections now follow the physical F0 = 0.02 dielectric water curve: weak when looking straight down, near-mirror at grazing angles.
Adaptive view-space raymarcher with binary refinement. Textbook real-time SSR: the reflected ray is marched in view space with a step length that scales with the current depth gap (long jumps in empty space, short jumps near the surface), then refined with 4–7 binary-search iterations once a crossing is detected. Distance-aware tolerance prevents Z-fighting on far samples. 14 / 24 / 40 march steps depending on SSR_QUALITY.

🌊 Coherent Procedural Wave System

4-octave fBm height-field with C2-continuous quintic smoothing. Each octave is rotated ~33° to break grid alignment.
Analytic gradients (4-sample central differences in world space) produce coherent wave slopes — reflections smoothly track wave geometry instead of jittering as random noise offsets did in earlier prototypes.
New WATER_WAVE_SCALE menu setting: Calm / Standard / Choppy / Stormy — controls wave amplitude from mirror to broken horizon.
New WATER_WAVE_DETAIL menu setting: Coarse / Standard / Dense — controls wave frequency from a few large swells to many fine ripples.

🌑 True Underwater Night Darkness

The old underwater scattering formula had three baked-in brightness floors (+0.25 on dayFactor, +0.3 on skyLight, plus a constant deep-water blue tint), so even pitch-black midnight underwater looked like a moonlit pool. v0.2.9 rebuilds the formula to honour the actual day/night cycle.
New UNDERWATER_NIGHT_DARKNESS menu setting:
- Moonlit Pool — original 0.2.8 brightness (compat mode)
- Dim — clearly night, still visible
- True Night — realistic darkness (default)
- Pitch Dark — extreme survival realism

🛠️ Smaller fixes

Removed the unused colortex6Out MRT write from composite.fsh along with its colortex6Format declaration — fewer attachments, simpler pipeline, less to break.
Centralized SSR/wave/underwater toggles into the regular profile system, so all six presets (VERY_LOW → EXTREME) carry sensible defaults.
Added English and Russian translations for all new options, plus value-label localization (Calm/Choppy/True Night etc.) — other languages fall back to English labels.

🆕 Recap — What landed in v0.2.6 — License Migration & Version Support

Version 0.2.6 is a legal protection and compatibility update. It migrates the project license to a copyleft non-commercial model to protect AuraLite from unauthorized commercial redistribution, adds copyright assertions to all source files, and officially expands tested compatibility.

⚖️ License Migration to CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

MIT to CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — Migrated the project's license from MIT to Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International. AuraLite is now legally protected against commercial reuse and unauthorized sales (e.g. on third-party launchers/portals).
Copyright Asserted — Explicitly declared copyright: Copyright (c) 2026 AlexanderNyr.
Embedded Code Headers — Embedded copyright headers (// AuraLite Shaders - Copyright (c) 2026 AlexanderNyr. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.) into all GLSL shader files (.fsh, .vsh), block properties (.properties), and translation tables (.lang).
Rules & Permissions FAQ — Added a clear FAQ section outlining allowed actions (monetized videos/streaming, inclusion in free CurseForge/Modrinth modpacks) and prohibited actions (commercial sales, paid Patreon redistributions, raw rehosting on ad-supported download hubs).

🎮 Version Compatibility Expansion

Minecraft 26.1.2 Support Verified — Tested and verified to work flawlessly on the latest Minecraft Java hotfix 26.1.2 with Iris + Sodium.
Minecraft 1.16.5 Support Verified — Tested and confirmed to run beautifully on the legendary modding version 1.16.5 (Iris/OptiFine).

✨ Features At A Glance

☁️ 1. Meteorological 3D Volumetric Clouds (Fly-Through!)

AuraLite features a fully physical, flyable 3D cloud system driven by 12-step Raymarching in world coordinates:

True 3D Space: Clouds float at a physical height (configurable base altitude). You can fly up, enter a dense, foggy overcast, and rise above the clouds to see an endless rolling sea of fluffy cumulus clouds.
Camera-Inside-Cloud Veil (v0.2.5): When flying inside the cloud layer, a soft volumetric white/grey fog surrounds the camera.
Independent Wind-Shear Layers (v0.2.5): Each cloud layer (Cirrus, Altocumulus, Altostratus, Cumulus) moves on its own rotated/sheared domain with the WIND_SPEED setting.
Cloud Render Distance (v0.2.5): New 4-step control (Near / Standard / Far / Very Far) — from 3 000 m to 16 000 m horizon-scale decks.
Beer's Law Self-Shadowing: Realistic light absorption makes cloud bottoms dense and dark while cloud tops glow with brilliant white/gold illumination.
Mie Scattering (Silver Lining): Looking towards the sun produces a glowing golden halo around the cloud edges.
Overcast Storms: When raining (/weather rain), the fluffy cumulus clouds automatically expand, darken, and merge into an ominous, heavy Nimbostratus/Cumulonimbus storm deck.

🌠 2. Living Night Sky (since v0.2.0)

The night sky is no longer just a static starfield — it's a fully procedural cosmos:

Aurora Borealis: Realistic, flowing northern lights that ripple across the upper sky. Modes: Disabled / Only in Cold Biomes / Always Enabled, with independent speed and brightness controls. (v0.2.5: rendered in gbuffers_skybasic for reliability; cold-biome detection uses real biome uniforms. v1.0.7: tone softened and high-frequency noise removed — read as a photographic glow rather than oversaturated neon.)
Milky Way Nebula: A subtle diagonal brownish galactic band glows softly above the horizon, with adjustable brightness.
Procedural Stars: Independent brightness and density sliders let you choose between a few crisp pinpricks or a brilliantly dense Hubble-style sky. Stars sparkle and twinkle in real time.
Physically-Based Meteors / Falling Stars (v1.0.0): configurable meteor activity, brightness, moon washout, and persistent ionization trails bring realistic night-sky streaks to the Overworld and the End.
Persistent Rainbow: After rain stops, a soft rainbow arcs across the sky and gently fades out as the wetness uniform decays. Brightness and saturation are configurable.

☀️ 3. Analytical Kelvin Sun & Moon — Enhanced in v0.2.2, refined in v0.2.5

Tanner Helland Blackbody Sun: Sunlight color temperature is dynamically calculated in real time based on the sun's elevation angle using a physically-correct blackbody Kelvin curve (selectable: Cool / Realistic / Warm Golden). This yields photoreal sunrise/sunset colors (~1800K–2200K), warm golden hours (~2800K), and clean crisp white noon light (~5700K–5800K).
Beer-Lambert Atmospheric Extinction: Sunlight intensity dynamically drops as the sun approaches the horizon due to scattering in thick atmospheric masses: $airMass = \frac{1}{\sin(\alpha) + 0.15 \cdot (\alpha_{deg} + 3.885)^{-1.253}}$ This yields incredibly soft, rich, and breathtaking sunset and sunrise golden hour transitions!
Independent Sun & Moon Intensity (v0.2.2): 4-step master sliders let you push the day brighter (Blazing) or sink nights into total darkness (Pitch Night).
Moon Color Temperature (v0.2.2): choose between Icy Blue (cold), Silver (physically accurate 4100K), or Warm Cream (harvest-moon).
Sun Halo (Mie forward-scatter) & Enhanced Sunrise/Sunset Glow (v0.2.2) — warm scattering effects on terrain when looking near the low sun.
🆕 Extended Twilight Window (v0.2.5): Sunset/sunrise lighting stays warm/red at /time set 12800 instead of snapping to neutral.
Crispy Circular Sun & Moon Disks: Custom procedural, perfectly round, anti-aliased sun and moon disks are drawn onto the sky dome with glowing coronas and soft halo scattering.

👥 4. Soft Shadows, Immersive Dark Nights & Cozy Lights — Enhanced in v0.2.2, refined in v0.2.5

Rotated Poisson Disk Soft Shadows (v0.2.2): replaces the old fixed 3×3 PCF kernel. Three quality steps — Sharp / Soft / Ultra Soft — give natural-looking penumbra on shadow maps up to 4096×4096.
🆕 Shadow Slope Bias Fix (v0.2.5): bias now uses raw NdotL to prevent acne artifacts.
Shadow Distance Control (v0.2.2): cap dynamic shadow rendering at 60m / 80m / 120m / 160m for performance or quality tuning.
Shadow Tint (v0.2.2): realistic cool-blue tint for daytime shadows under an open sky (or neutral / warm if you prefer).
Ambient Lift (v0.2.2): control how dark shadowed areas appear at night and in caves.
Light Wrap (Terminator Softness) (v0.2.2): choose physical Lambert, a soft photographic wrap, or a stylized look. (v0.2.5: all profiles default to realistic Lambert.)
🆕 SSAO / SAO Contact Ambient Occlusion (v0.2.5): screen-space darkening in corners and at geometry intersections. Enabled on ULTRA+ profiles.
Deep Dark Nights (2× darker): Night ambient light, moonlight intensity, and fog are reduced by 2× by default to create incredibly atmospheric, immersive nights. Caves and forests are pitch dark, requiring torches for exploration (combine with the new Pitch Night moon preset for extra spice).
Warm Block Lights: Torches, lanterns, and lava emit a cozy golden-amber glow with physically accurate quadratic falloff.
🕯️ Cozy Torch Flickering (since v0.2.0): Real-time flickering animations for torches, campfires, and lanterns add a living, warm atmosphere to your shelters. Held-item light contribution (heldBlockLightValue) is also accounted for.

🌊 5. Physical Fresnel Water & Silver Moonlight Path — Refined in v0.2.5

Fresnel Effect: Water reflectivity is mathematically calculated based on your viewing angle. Looking straight down provides crystal transparency, while looking towards the horizon transitions water into a highly reflective, glossy sheet reflecting the sky dome.
Silver Moonlight Path: Moonlight specular reflection on water ripples has been increased by 4.5×. At midnight, a brilliant silver lunar reflection path shimmers across the waving ocean.
🆕 Unified GGX PBR Water Specular (v0.2.5): Water's old Blinn-Phong specular replaced by composite's GGX microfacet model with proper Fresnel — physically consistent with terrain PBR.
3D Geometric Waves: Vertex shader waves physically displace the water mesh in real-time, and react to rainStrength / thunderStrength for choppier seas during storms.
Independent Ripple & Specular Controls (since v0.2.0): WATER_RIFFLES (Calm / Standard / Choppy) and WATER_SPECULAR_STRENGTH (Soft / Standard / Glinting) can be tuned separately for the perfect water mood.
Zero Feedback Glitches: Designed to be extremely stable, utilizing no feedback-loop depth buffer reads to guarantee bug-free solid rendering on all GPUs.

🌧️ 6. Dynamic Weather Surfaces (since v0.2.0)

Wet Reflections: During rain, solid blocks like grass, dirt, and stone darken and become glossy, picking up sky reflections under open weather. Disables itself under roofs.
Low Ground Mist (Y ≈ 60–70) (refined in v0.2.5): Soft fog sheets drift across water and ice surfaces at dawn and dusk. Uses large slow sheets + small breakup noise with optical distance accumulation for natural-looking radiation fog. Humidity from rain/wetness makes the mist persist longer.
Camera-Inside-Mist Veil (v0.2.5): Standing inside the mist layer produces a subtle whole-view forward-scattering veil.
Thunderstorm Awareness: Shaders distinguish between regular rain and full thunderstorms via the thunderStrength uniform, intensifying cloud darkness and wave chop accordingly.

🌿 7. Lively Foliage

Waving animations for oak/spruce/birch leaves, tall grass, flowers, vines, lily pads, and crops.
Gently animated using hardware-optimized sine waves and time constants.
🧊 Ice fix (since v0.2.0, refined in v1.0.4): regular ice renders with texture + semi-transparency; packed/blue ice renders opaque with texture. All ice types have waving and refraction disabled to eliminate visual glitches.
🪟 Glass rendering (v1.0.4): all glass blocks and panes (including every stained-glass variant and tinted glass) now render with their actual texture and proper transparency via the dedicated translucent terrain pass.

💎 8. Full LabPBR 1.3 Material Support + POM — PBR refined in v0.2.5

3D Normal Maps: Real-time TBN (Tangent-Binormal-Normal) matrices generate true three-dimensional depth on blocks (stone crevices, brick joints) reacting dynamically to light angles.
Specular Reflection (GGX Microfacet): Polished surfaces give sharp glossy glints, while metallic surfaces (gold, copper, iron) tint the specular reflection with the block's native albedo. (v0.2.5: correct NdotL cosine factor added for Cook-Torrance BRDF accuracy.)
🧱 Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM) (since v0.2.0): True per-pixel block relief that pops out of the surface. Configurable POM_DEPTH (1–3) and POM_STEPS (1–4). Disabled in all profiles by default for stability; can be enabled manually. Recommended to keep off on incompatible resource packs.
Seamless Fallback: Falls back automatically to gorgeous flat vanilla textures if no PBR resource pack is active.

🌀 9. Cosmic Nether Portal (since v0.2.0, improved in v0.2.5)

The vanilla Nether portal texture is procedurally transformed into a swirling 3D plasma vortex — animated purple/magenta cosmic energy that pulses with hypnotic depth. Mapped via dedicated block ID 10006 in block.properties. (v0.2.5: portal pixels are flagged as emissive so composite skips scene lighting and displays the plasma as-is.)

🪟 10. Translucent Block Rendering (added in v1.0.4, unchanged in v1.0.6)

AuraLite renders translucent blocks with proper per-block transparency through a dedicated gbuffers_terrain_translucent pass, ensuring correct display on both Iris and Oculus pipelines:

Regular ice — semi-transparent with actual texture; opacity scales with WATER_TRANSPARENCY (Clear / Balanced / Deep).
Packed ice / blue ice / frosted ice — opaque with texture, visually distinct from regular ice.
All glass blocks and panes — every vanilla glass type (clear, all 16 stained variants, pane variants, tinted glass) renders with its actual texture and correct transparency. No more invisible glass against bright skies.

🎬 11. Cinematic Post-Processing — Refined in v1.0.1, v1.0.3

Multiple Tone Mapping Curves (since v0.2.0): Pick from Soft, Filmic (ACES), or Intense (High Contrast) to match your preferred mood.
Color Vibrancy (since v0.2.0): 4-step non-linear saturation control (Muted / Balanced / Colorful / Vivid) that makes foliage glow emerald and skies look lush, without crushing skin tones.
Exposure Brightness: Muted / Balanced / Vibrant — global brightness lift.
Subtle Vignette: Gentle lens-darkening at screen edges for improved depth and immersion.

🔥 12. Procedural Lava & Heat Shimmer (v1.0.6)

Procedural Magma Surface: Lava and flowing-lava blocks are rendered with a procedural Voronoi crack field, animated convection flow, rare hot spots, and rising bubbles.
3D Parallax Cracks: A 4-step parallax occlusion raymarch gives real depth between the dark basalt crust and glowing magma.
Viscous Vertex Waves: The top face slowly swells with a heavier, slower wave than water, giving a molten feel.
Heat Shimmer: final.fsh applies a subtle screen-space distortion above lava pixels to simulate rising hot air.
PBR-Ready: Rough basalt crust (0.95) and glossy magma cracks (0.02) produce physically plausible highlights.

🛡️ 13. Realistic Atmospheric Fog (v0.2.5)

Fog density now accounts for altitude (aerosol concentration decays with height), horizon path length, and indoor/outdoor exposure via skylight.
Consistent Beer-Lambert distance fog with height-weighted density — no delayed fog walls.

☁️ Cloud Altitude Classification

AuraLite's sky is meteorologically modeled after the international cloud classification system:

Altitude (m)
16 000 ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ↑ Cumulonimbus (Cb)
12 000 ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─│
10 000   Ci  ─ Cirrus              │ Vertical
 8 000   Cc  ─ Cirrocumulus         │ Development
 6 000 ─ ─ Cs ─ Cirrostratus ─ ─ ─ ─│─ High Clouds (Cirrus layer)
 5 000   Ac  ─ Altocumulus          │
 4 000   As  ─ Altostratus          │
 2 000 ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─│─ Mid Clouds
 1 500   Sc  ─ Stratocumulus        │
 1 000   St  ─ Stratus              │
 500     Ns  ─ Nimbostratus         │─ Low Clouds (Cumulus layer)
   0 ─ ─ Cu ─ Cumulus ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─│

AuraLite smoothly transitions these layers based on in-game weather conditions (clearing, rain, or storms).

⚙️ Performance Optimizations (OpenGL 4.6 Native)

AuraLite is built from the ground up for maximum FPS using OpenGL 4.6 native hardware operations:

Multiply-Add Friendly Math: Wave and waving-foliage math is written as simple multiply-add expressions so modern drivers can optimize it efficiently, while avoiding the explicit fma() intrinsic that caused compilation issues on some GPUs / Mesa drivers.
Bitwise Noise Generation: Replacing slow transcendental float functions (fract(sin(dot(...)))) with ultra-fast Integer Bitwise PCG-style hashes utilizing floatBitsToUint and uintBitsToFloat.
Early-Ray Termination: Volumetric raymarching terminates instantly once cloud transmittance falls below 2%, saving rendering power.
No Hand Transparency Glitches: Handheld items, particles, and mobs are rendered in a separate stable path without tangent matrix overhead, eliminating "translucent hand" bugs.
Dead Code Elimination (v0.2.3–v0.2.5): Removed unused noise/fbm functions, dead cloud raymarching code from gbuffers_skybasic, and redundant render calls to reduce GPU compilation time.
Profile-Based Scaling: Every feature (POM, Auroras, SSAO, Cozy Lights, Wet Reflections, Ground Mist, Shadow Distance, Cloud Distance, Sun Halo, etc.) is intelligently distributed across the LOW / MED / HIGH / ULTRA / EXTREME profiles so low-end systems don't pay for effects they can't afford.

🎛️ In-Game Configuration Options

AuraLite includes localized in-game configuration files for 69 language codes, including major European, Asian, American regional variants and compatibility aliases such as fil_ph / tl_ph.

⚠️ Some localization strings may be inaccurate. If something looks strange, compare with the English original.

`[Lighting Settings]`

Dynamic Shadows — Toggle sun/moon shadows.
Shadow Resolution — 1024 / 2048 / 4096
Shadow Softness (v0.2.2) — Sharp / Soft / Ultra Soft — rotated Poisson disk filtering.
Shadow Distance (v0.2.2) — Near (60m) / Standard (80m) / Far (120m) / Ultra (160m).
Shadow Tint (v0.2.2) — Neutral Gray / Cool Blue (Realistic) / Warm.
Shadow Lift / Ambient (v0.2.2) — Dark / Standard / Lifted (Bright).
Light Wrap (Terminator) (v0.2.2) — Realistic (Lambert) / Soft / Stylized.
Torch Warmth — Cozy / Warm / Intense — Customize block light warmth.
Torch Flickering (COZY_LIGHTS) — Real-time flicker animations for torches, campfires, and lanterns.
PBR Lighting — Toggle PBR specular reflections and normal mapping.
3D Block Relief (POM) — Enable Parallax Occlusion Mapping for true 3D block textures (LabPBR resource pack required).
PBR Intensity — Subtle / Standard / Mirror
🆕 SSAO / SAO Occlusion (v0.2.5) — Screen-space ambient occlusion for contact shadows in corners, under blocks, and around geometry intersections.
🆕 SSAO Strength (v0.2.5) — Subtle / Balanced / Deep.
🆕 Screen-Space Reflections (SSR) (v0.2.9) — loader-agnostic screen-space reflections for water and wet glossy surfaces.
🆕 SSR Quality (v0.2.9) — Fast / Balanced / High raymarch step budget.
🆕 SSR Strength (v0.2.9) — Soft / Balanced / Mirror reflection intensity.
🆕 PBR Render Distance (PBR_DISTANCE) (v1.0.3) — Near (16m) / Standard (48m) / Far (128m) / Unlimited — maximum distance for PBR specular calculations. Saves GPU on far terrain.

`[Sun & Moon]` (since v0.2.2)

Sun Intensity — Dim / Standard / Bright / Blazing
Sun Colour Temperature — Cool / Neutral · Realistic (Tanner Helland) · Warm Golden
Sun Halo (Mie Scatter) — toggle the warm forward-scatter glow when looking near the sun.
Enhanced Sunrise/Sunset Glow — toggle stronger warm back-scatter at low sun angles.
Moon Intensity — Pitch Night / Standard / Bright Moon / Full Night
Moon Colour Temperature — Icy Blue / Silver (Realistic 4100K) / Warm Cream

`[Foliage Settings]`

Waving Leaves — Toggle leaves animation.
Waving Foliage — Toggle grass, flowers, and crops animation.
Wind Speed — Gentle / Breeze / Gale
🆕 Foliage SSS (FOLIAGE_SSS) (v1.0.3) — Subsurface scattering / translucency for leaves and plants (light bleeding when looking toward the sun).

`[Water Settings]`

Water Waves — Toggle 3D vertex water waves.
Water Density — Clear / Balanced / Deep — Adjust water transparency.
Water Ripple Strength (WATER_RIFFLES) — Calm / Standard / Choppy — Fine normal-map ripples.
Water Specular Glow (WATER_SPECULAR_STRENGTH) — Soft / Standard / Glinting — Brightness of sun/moon highlights on the ripples.
🆕 Water Wave Scale (WATER_WAVE_SCALE) (v0.2.9) — Calm / Standard / Choppy / Stormy — procedural wave amplitude used by SSR.
🆕 Water Wave Detail (WATER_WAVE_DETAIL) (v0.2.9) — Coarse / Standard / Dense — procedural wave frequency/detail.
🆕 Underwater Night Darkness (v0.2.9) — Moonlit Pool / Dim / True Night / Pitch Dark — controls how dark underwater scenes become at night.

`[Sky & Clouds]`

Volumetric 3D Clouds — Toggle raymarched clouds.
Cloud Altitude — Low (~110m) / Standard (~160m) / High (~240m)
Cloud Thickness — Thin (Cirrus) / Standard (Cumulus) / Dense (Stormy)
🆕 Cloud Render Distance (v0.2.5) — Near / Standard / Far / Very Far — Maximum draw distance for volumetric clouds.
🆕 Cloud Shadows (v0.2.7) — transparent procedural shadows from cloud density.
🆕 Cloud Shadow Strength (v0.2.7) — Soft / Balanced / Dramatic.
🆕 Godrays / Sun Shafts (v0.2.7) — physically-inspired volumetric single-scattering light shafts.
🆕 Godrays Quality (v0.2.7) — Fast / Balanced / High.
Aurora Borealis — Disabled / Only in Cold Biomes / Always Enabled
Aurora Speed — Slow / Standard / Fast
Aurora Brightness — Soft / Standard / Glowing
Milky Way Brightness — Dim / Standard / Bright
Stars Brightness — Faint / Standard / Brilliant
Stars Density — Few / Standard / Dense
🆕 Meteors (Falling Stars) (v1.0.0) — Physically-based meteor streaks across the night sky.
🆕 Meteor Activity (ZHR) (v1.0.0) — Sporadic (~10/hr) / Active Shower / Meteor Storm.
🆕 Meteor Brightness (v1.0.0) — Faint (Realistic) / Standard / Bright Fireballs.
Rainbow Intensity — Subtle / Balanced / Vivid — Post-rain rainbow arc.

`[Post-Processing & Fog]`

Fog Density — Low / Medium / High — Atmospheric horizon mist.
Low Ground Mist (GROUND_MIST) — Realistic dawn/evening radiation fog at Y ≈ 60–70.
Exposure Brightness — Muted / Balanced / Vibrant
Color Vibrancy (COLOR_SATURATION) — Muted / Balanced / Colorful / Vivid
Image Contrast (CONTRAST) — Soft / Filmic (ACES) / Intense (High Contrast) / Photographic (AgX-like) — Choose the tone mapping curve.
🆕 HDR Bloom (v1.0.1) — cheap single-pass neighbour blur for overbright emissive sources.
🆕 Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) (v0.2.7) — motion-reprojected temporal resolve for high presets.
🆕 TAA Strength (v0.2.7) — Light / Balanced / Stable.
🆕 Spatial Anti-Aliasing (SPATIAL_AA_MODE) (v1.0.3) — Off / FXAA / SMAA — post-process edge smoothing. FXAA uses Sobel gradient-directed blending; SMAA adds depth discontinuity detection for geometry edges. Freely combinable with TAA.
Vignette — Toggle cinematic corner darkening.
(Hidden) Rain Wetness Reflections (WET_REFLECTIONS) — Wet glossy ground during rain (enabled by default in MED+ profiles).

🎚️ Quality Profiles (rebalanced in v1.0.4, unchanged in v1.0.6)

Profile	Target	Shadows	Clouds	Cloud Shadows	Godrays	TAA	SSR	PBR	PBR Dist	AA	SSAO	Heat Shimmer	Heavy Extras
VERY_LOW	Maximum FPS	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	16m	Off	❌	❌	Most extras off
LOW	Weak GPUs	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	16m	FXAA	❌	❌	Water/foliage motion, stars, vignette
MED	Balanced	✅ 1024	✅ Std	✅ Soft	✅ Fast	❌	✅ F	✅	48m	FXAA	❌	✅ Subtle	Wet refl + ground mist + SSS
HIGH	High quality	✅ 2048	✅ Far	✅ Balanced	✅ Bal	✅	✅ B	✅	128m	SMAA	✅ Subtle	✅ Balanced	Full atmosphere + SSR + TAA
ULTRA	Very high	✅ 4096	✅ VFar	✅ Balanced	✅ High	✅	✅ H	✅	128m	SMAA	✅ Balanced	✅ Balanced	High-end visuals
EXTREME	Max quality	✅ 4096	✅ Dense	✅ Dramatic	✅ High	✅	✅ H	✅	∞	SMAA	✅ Deep	✅ Strong	Heaviest cinematic

💫 Shooting stars are disabled on VERY_LOW / LOW and enabled from MED upward. 🌿 Foliage SSS is enabled from MED upward (disabled on VERY_LOW/LOW for maximum FPS). 🔥 Heat shimmer is disabled on VERY_LOW / LOW and enabled from MED upward.

📄 License & Compatibility

AuraLite is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Officially Supported Platform: Minecraft 1.16.5 – 26.1.2 with Sodium + Iris or OptiFine loader.
Note: Verified to work flawlessly on Minecraft 1.16.5, 1.20.1, 1.21.1, and 26.1.2.

⚖️ Rules & Permissions (FAQ)

Videos & Streams: You are free to showcase, stream, and use this shader in your videos (including monetized channels on YouTube, Twitch, etc.).
Modpacks: You are free to include this shader in your free modpacks on CurseForge, Modrinth, or other platforms.
Personal Tweaks: You can modify the shader code for personal use.
No Re-hosting: Do not upload the raw shader files to third-party sites (especially behind ad links like AdFly). Always use and link to our official, authorized sources below.
Derivative Works: If you modify this shader and distribute it, your version must be free, open-source, and licensed under the exact same CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license with clear attribution to the original author.

🌐 Official & Authorized Sources:

GitHub: https://github.com/AlexanderNyr/AuraLite-Shaders
Modrinth: https://modrinth.com/shader/auralite-shaders
CurseForge: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/shaders/auralite-shaders