Filmicsoft

A high-performance, semi-realistic shader pack for Iris + Sodium. It adds light and atmosphere without repainting the game, and runs on macOS, Windows and Linux.

Features

Lighting and shadows

• Real sun and moon shadows from a filtered shadow map, reaching 64 blocks by default (up to 256), with a soft sky-light shadow beyond it
• Soft shadows that behave like real ones: crisp where an object meets the ground, widening and fading with distance, so long sunset shadows melt away
• Shadows stay fixed to the world while you walk and look around
• Optional shadows from mobs and grass
• Thin blocks (leaves, plants, panes, fences) cast clean shadows without shading themselves
• Light filters softly through leaves, grass and vines
• Warm torch and block light; lava, glowstone, lanterns and other light sources glow
• Golden mornings and evenings: the sun warms and dims toward the horizon
• Adjustable sun strength, sky ambient and moon / night brightness

Sky and atmosphere

• Sky scattering: deeper blue overhead, a warm glow around the sun
• Sun-lit clouds
• Distance haze that matches the sky, plus a horizon mist
• God rays
• Rain atmosphere with wet-looking ground

Water

• Water that reflects the sky, with blocky ripples in keeping with the game
• Underwater look: light absorption, teal fog and caustics on the sea floor

Movement

• Waving leaves, grass and plants with adjustable wind; shadows sway with them

Film look

• Bloom, held back on bright sand and stone so they don't wash out
• Soft diffusion
• Colour grading: exposure, contrast, black lift, saturation, vibrance, a colour intensity limit and tone colour presets
• Highlight roll-off, so sand and snow don't clip to flat white
• Chromatic aberration: a subtle lens fringe toward the screen edges
• Film grain, vignette and FXAA anti-aliasing

Why Filmicsoft

Realistic Minecraft shaders usually get their look from global illumination, ray tracing or path tracing. Those look great but cost a lot of frame time and need a strong GPU, and they often push the game so far toward photo-realism that it stops feeling like Minecraft. Filmicsoft goes the other way: a realistic-leaning image without GI or ray tracing, fast enough for everyday play.

• Maintains Minecraft's original feel. Vanilla textures, block shapes, sky, clouds, sun and moon are kept. Light, shadow, haze and colour are improved around them, never replaced, so the world still reads as Minecraft.
• High performance. Every pass is measured on the GPU and kept only if it earns its cost. The post-processing chain adds about 1.2 ms per frame at 1080p on an Apple M4. Every effect can be switched off on its own, and the shadow map can be turned off or made cheaper on the Shadows page.
• Runs everywhere, macOS included. Written for GLSL 330 (no compute shaders, no SSBOs), so it runs the same on Windows, Linux and macOS. That makes it fully supported on Macs, where OpenGL stops at 4.1 and most shader packs fail to load or render wrong. Built on Apple Silicon.
• Light on your system. Surfaces are lit where they are drawn (no G-buffer, no deferred pass) and bloom runs at low resolution, keeping memory use and bandwidth low; that also matters on laptops and integrated GPUs.

Install

1. Install Iris and Sodium.
2. Drop the downloaded zip into .minecraft/shaderpacks/ (no need to unzip it).
3. In game: Video Settings > Shader Packs > Filmicsoft > Apply.

Works with Fabulously Optimized. OptiFine should work too but is untested.

Source, changelog and issues: GitHub.