Crystal Shaders

Magical, blocky, impossibly coloured — an Iris shader pack for Minecraft Java 26.3.

 

Crystal Shaders is a Modified Pack derived from https://www.complementary.dev
r5.9.3 by EminGT / Complementary Development.All of the base pack's architecture — shadows, water,
clouds, PBR, reflections, coloured lighting, TAA and the settings menus — is Complementary's, and it is
credited here, visibly, as its license requires. Anything you see that looks new is on top of their work.

License: this pack is distributed under the Complementary License Agreement 1.7, included
unmodified as `License.txt` inside the zip. That agreement is the only license and the only set of
terms that applies to Crystal Shaders. There is no additional license, no second set of conditions, and
nothing here adds to or overrides it — read `License.txt` Complementary Reimagined
for what you may and may not do.
Crystal Shaders is not a Complementary Development product and is not affiliated with or endorsed by
Complementary Development.

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Status: alpha

This is the first public version. Feature names, defaults and the exact look of the sky will still move.
Please report anything that looks broken or wrong on your hardware — at this stage that is a bug report.

Install

1. Do not unzip the pack.
2. Drop `Crystal Shaders.zip` into `.minecraft/shaderpacks/`.
3. Options → Video Settings → Shader Packs → select Crystal Shaders
4. Open Shader Pack Settings and pick the "Crystal" profile for the full experience: max quality with
   every Crystal feature switched on.

Requires: Minecraft Java 26.3, Fabric, Iris 1.11.7+mc26.3 (Sodium 0.9.x).

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What it looks like

Every scenario below differs from the base pack out of the box, with no fiddling — including the
daytime overworld, where the sun is a cube with real rays and a faint rainbow halo, the sky is a deeper
azure at the zenith fading to a pale cool horizon, clouds are smooth story-mode gradients, and the whole
frame is graded cool in the shadows and warm in the highlights.

The sky is built out of blocks. Sun, moon, planets and the End's black hole are cubes, not discs. The
black hole wears a square accretion disk in a tilted plane, brightening on the side swinging toward you,
and it lights the End like late evening — long shadows, one direction. The gas giant's rings are square
and the planet casts a square shadow across them.

A night sky that is actually alive. Coloured twinkling stars, dense nebula veils, and a visible
Milky Way built from thousands of unresolved band stars laid along the galactic axis in real colours and
cut through by dark dust lanes. Occasional shooting stars — blocky-headed, warm, with a fading tail.
One star field is shared by the Overworld and the End, so the two skies read as the same universe.

The End is above the Overworld. Look up in the Overworld's night sky and you can see it: the black hole
as a tiny dark notch about two stars across, and beside it the End's three planets — each exactly one star
cell wide, violet, pale blue, rust — the face turned toward the hole lit, the far face in shade. They carry
no twinkle, which is the only clue that they are worlds and not stars. In the End, the Overworld hangs low
under the horizon as a small cube planet: pixel-art ocean, continents, ice shelves, caps and drifting cloud
swirls. Home is far enough away to look like a marble.

Blocky auroras, in both dimensions. Curtains gridded on world compass angle and altitude, so every block
is the same angular size and the field wraps the sky without a seam. Coverage is continuous and only
brightness is quantised, in five steps — the blocks join edge to edge into curtains with a ragged hem
instead of scattering into floaters. Violet at the foot, emerald through the body, cyan at the crown.

Story-mode clouds. Cloud placement and sizing come from Complementary Reimagined's own spawning code, so
where clouds exist and how big they are still behaves like the base pack — they are just filled with a
smooth gradient. A toggle (on by default) keeps the vanilla cloud shape with the gradient applied.

A breathing Nether. Warm fumes boiling up off the lava seas, sparse glowing embers and ash drifting on
the hot air, and a molten-crust lava made of cooled basalt plates split by crawling, glowing fissures that
breathe with heat (all dimensions). Fume and ember glow is normalised and luminance-capped, so the Nether
reads as a dark cave lit by lava rather than a white-out.

Mielon's The Sift — full compatibility. Iridescent cyan/magenta ichor fluid that glows from within,
waves like water and tints transmitted light; ichor cauldrons, glass and panes on the same palette; the
Sift portal using the portal effect; all 64 mod blocks mapped, including the siftslate stone family, the
overgrown willow woodset, foliage, sculk variants, ichor snow and soul blocks, signs and boats; glowing
siftslate ores alongside vanilla ore glow; emissive flora; and ichor buckets and bottles that cast teal
handheld light.

Vivid by default. High saturation and vibrance, split toning, a soft magical bloom with warm halation,
richer sunset lightshafts. Candy-bright without clipping.

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Settings

The first screen in Shader Pack Settings, **"Crystal Signature Look"**, holds everything new. Everything
else is the familiar Complementary menu, and all pre-existing options keep the base pack's default values.

Compatibility notes

- Built for Iris. Not designed for OptiFine or other shader loaders.
- The End's black hole lensing is an artistic approximation, not a general-relativistic simulation.
- Validated by a GLSL preprocessor and a compile check of all 219 shader entry points, with no compile
  regressions against the base pack. Not yet tested across GPU hardware.

Credits

- Complementary Reimagined r5.9.3 — EminGT / Complementary Development — Complementary
- Target mod support: block, item and entity IDs.