Crystal Shaders 1.0.0-alpha — first public release

This is the first version of Crystal Shaders ever published, and it's an alpha. Everything here is new to you; there's no older public build to compare against. Features, defaults and names may still change between releases.

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

Crystal Shaders is a Modified Pack derived from Complementary Reimagined r5.9.3 by EminGT / Complementary Development — Complementary
The base pack's architecture (shadows, water, clouds, PBR, reflections, coloured lighting, TAA, settings menus) is kept intact. The included License.txt is the unchanged Complementary License Agreement 1.7 and is the only license that applies to this pack.
The sky bodies are cubes
Sun, moon, planets and the End's black hole are all built as blocky cubes rather than discs — the sun and moon get real rays and a faint rainbow halo, the black hole wears a square accretion disk spun in a tilted plane, the gas giant's rings are square and cast a square shadow across themselves, and the black hole lights the End like late evening, throwing long shadows.

A night sky that is actually alive
Coloured, twinkling stars and dense nebula veils.
A visible Milky Way — thousands of unresolved band stars laid along the galactic axis, in real colours, cut through by dark dust lanes, plus the band's own low glow.
Occasional shooting stars: blocky-headed, warm, with a fading tail.
One star field shared by the Overworld and the End, so the two skies read as the same universe.
The End is above the Overworld
From the Overworld's night sky you can see the End: the black hole as a tiny dark notch about two stars across with its disk swinging toward you bright, and the End's three planets beside it — one star cell each, violet, pale blue, rust, lit on the face turned toward the hole. They carry no twinkle, which is the only clue they're worlds and not stars. In the End itself, the Overworld hangs low under the horizon as a small cube planet: pixel-art ocean, continents, shelves, caps, drifting cloud swirls. Home is far enough away to look like a marble.

Blocky auroras, both dimensions
Auroras are gridded on world azimuth/elevation, so every block is the same angular size (~1.25°) and the curtain 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, faded at both ends of the band. Peak brightness is deliberately kept low so it reads as coloured light on a night sky, not a white-out.

Story-mode clouds
Clouds use Complementary Reimagined's own spawning and sizing, so where clouds appear and how big they are matches the base pack, with a smooth story-mode gradient fill. A toggle (on by default) keeps the vanilla cloud shape while applying the gradient.

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

Mielon's The Sift — full compatibility
Ichor fluid (block id 32020): iridescent cyan/magenta swirl that glows from within, waves like water, tints transmitted light.
Ichor cauldron, glass and pane glow with the same palette; sift_portal uses the portal effect.
All 64 mod blocks mapped: siftslate stone family, overgrown willow woodset, foliage, sculk variants, ichor snow, soul block, signs, boats.
The five siftslate ores glow out of the box, as does vanilla ore glow.
Emissive flora (sculkflower, whisperbloom, sunburst plant), and ichor buckets/bottles cast teal handheld light.
Vivid by default
T_SATURATION 1.45, T_VIBRANCE 1.50, split-toned grade, soft magical bloom halation, richer sunset lightshafts. Bright and candy-coloured without clipping.

New "Crystal" profile
One click gives max quality plus every Crystal feature enabled — cube sky bodies, story-mode clouds, nebulae, Milky Way, auroras, Nether fumes and dust, crystal lava, glowing ores.

Alpha caveats
Validated with a GLSL preprocessor plus a glslang compile check of all 219 entry points, no compile regressions. Not yet GPU- or in-game-tested across hardware — if a sky feature misbehaves on your card, please say so in the issues.
Sky brightness is tuned by offline measurement of the additive terms, not by screenshots of your machine. Some values may want a nudge once more people report in.
Colours, the aurora band heights, and the End/Overworld planet placement are the things most likely to change in the next build.
The black hole lensing is an artistic approximation, not full general relativity.
Report anything that looks wrong — at this stage, "looks wrong" is a bug report, and it's the most useful thing you can give me.