Cursed Descent
- By
a cursed shaderpack. gets progressively worse. read the epilepsy warning!
2026-09-02_21.44.24.png
2026-09-02_21.45.23.png
2026-09-03_16.29.39.png
Description
⚠️ READ THIS BEFORE YOU DOWNLOAD ⚠️
THIS PACK CAN CAUSE SEIZURES
If you have epilepsy — especially photosensitive epilepsy — do not play this pack.
If you do not know whether you have epilepsy, do not turn off the safety toggle, and talk to a doctor before exposing yourself to rapid flashing. Many people who are photosensitive find out for the first time when something like this triggers a seizure. Never having had one before is not proof that you are safe.
At its higher settings this pack deliberately produces rapid full-screen flashing, single-frame colour inversion, high-contrast strobing, and violently shifting brightness. These are exactly the visual patterns known to trigger photosensitive seizures.
The safety toggle
A setting called FORCE_EPILEPSY_SAFE sits directly beside the main slider in Shader Pack Settings. It is ON by default. While it is on, the fast strobe is replaced by a slow pulse and the most dangerous flashing never runs.
Leave it on. Turning it off should be a deliberate, informed choice made by someone who knows they are not at risk.
Stop immediately if you experience any of these
Dizziness, altered vision, eye or face twitching, jerking or shaking of arms or legs, disorientation, confusion, loss of awareness, or convulsions. Stop playing and consult a doctor.
Parents should watch for these signs in children, who are more susceptible than adults.
Reduce your risk
Play in a well-lit room, sit back from the screen, use a smaller screen, don't play when tired or sleep-deprived, and take regular breaks.
This warning is not boilerplate. Please take it seriously.
---
Cursed Descent
One slider. Ten steps. It gets worse.
Cursed Descent is a shaderpack with a single setting: how wrong the world is.
At 0 it's a clean, normal-looking pack — filmic tonemapping, a gentle vignette, correct lighting. You could play on it. At 10 the ground is on fire, the frame ignites on a heartbeat, and something is watching you from every dark corner of the screen.
Every level in between adds a new layer and keeps every layer below it. Nothing is ever removed. You just keep going down.
The descent
| Level | |
|---|---|
| 0 | Clean baseline. Nothing is wrong. |
| 1 | The vignette closes a little further than it should. The sky's hue is subtly off. Reads as "moody". |
| 2 | The terrain starts breathing. The screen tears into displaced bands. Mobs twitch. |
| 3 | Colour rotates over time. Lighting stops matching its source. Geometry leans off the grid. |
| 4 | Block textures bleed into their neighbours. Distant geometry inverts. Surfaces stain. |
| 5 | The screen folds into itself. Frames stop leaving. The world begins to rust and scorch. |
| 6 | Magma veins crack open along the seams of the world. The sky becomes a ceiling of fire. The image occasionally freezes while your input keeps working. |
| 7 | Walls run with something dark. Mobs catch fire. Something stands at the edge of vision that isn't there when you turn to look. |
| 8 | Surfaces burn down to coals. Embers rise. The dark parts of your screen open eyes. |
| 9 | The ground softens and sags. The air itself burns. Cracks open across the camera lens. |
| 10 | Convection drags the world upward. Everything ignites. You are not being watched by one thing. |
Levels 5 and above are genuinely difficult to play on. That's intentional, not a bug report.
Some of what's in there
The block that breathes. The block under your feet expands and contracts on a slow cycle — and freezes the instant you look directly at it. Look away and it starts again.
Faces in the stone. Cobblestone, deepslate, netherrack and leaves grow faces in their grain at a distance. Walk closer and the rock flattens back out.
The thing in the reflection. Dirt and stone become mirrors onto somewhere else, where a tall figure stands three blocks behind you. It moves correctly as you turn. You cannot see it by turning around.
Anti-light. Torches darken what they touch. Unlit caves burn white. The actual light levels are untouched, so the glowing white caverns still spawn mobs.
Meeting yourself. The pack keeps a rolling history of where you've been. Cross a path you walked two seconds ago and the frame buffer stops converging.
Rain on the lens. Condensation builds on the camera in rain and near lava. Shake your mouse to wipe it off. This works because it reads your actual camera movement.
Cyberspace mode. A completely separate ten-step ladder hidden in the config file: textures that never finish loading, a black void where the world's distance should be, glowing structure in place of surfaces, and a wall of roiling red noise at the horizon with things pressing against the inside of it.
Other settings
Beside the main slider you'll also find:
- FORCE_EPILEPSY_SAFE — on by default. See the warning at the top of this page.
- EYE — removes the watching eye entirely, including the copies that open across the frame at level 10, if that particular one isn't for you.
Requirements
- Minecraft 1.21.1
- Iris (also works on OptiFine)
- A GPU from this decade. Level 10 is not cheap.
Install
Drop the zip into .minecraft/shaderpacks/ — no need to unzip. Select it in Video Settings → Shader Packs, then open Shader Pack Settings to move the slider.
License
All rights reserved. You're welcome to download this and use it in your own game, and you're welcome to record and stream footage of it — credit is appreciated but not required.
Please don't re-upload it, put it in a modpack, publish modified versions, or reuse the source in another pack. If you want to do something not covered here, ask me first.
If you record or stream this pack, please carry the seizure warning above into your video description. Your viewers did not choose to install it and cannot turn the toggle on.
The Cursed Descent Team
