Firmament 0.22

Faster clouds in rain and tidier shader code, with exactly the same picture.

• Clouds in rain: about 1.05× faster. Cloud samples that are already fully dense skip noise that cannot change them; higher Cloud Coverage settings benefit too.
• Under the hood: repeated shader code now uses shared helpers, the reflection-snapshot pass decodes each pixel once, and unused declarations are gone.
• Same image: every automated comparison image is bit-identical to 0.21.
• Nothing slower: every other pass costs the same as in 0.21. Four further optimization ideas were measured and left out because they were not faster.

Timings are isolated GPU pass measurements against 0.21 on an RTX 4060 Laptop GPU at 2560 × 1440 with the High preset, not frame rates. The sky, fog and night-sky speed-ups of 0.21 are kept.

Rendering, presets, options and the 29 supported Minecraft Java versions are unchanged from 0.21: 1.18.2; 1.19, 1.19.1, 1.19.2 and 1.19.4; 1.20–1.20.6; 1.21–1.21.11; 26.1, 26.1.1, 26.1.2, 26.2 and 26.3. Automated OpenGL comparisons match 0.21 exactly.

Known: after reloading chunks with F3+A, shadows of blocks outside your view appear once you look at them. Iris only builds chunks the camera sees.

Use the Iris and Sodium builds matching your Minecraft version; 26.2 and 26.3 target the OpenGL renderer. Recorded gameplay evidence remains 1.21.1 / NeoForge 21.1.228 / Iris 1.8.12 / Sodium 0.6.13 with 0.10-alpha.2.

Keep the ZIP intact, place it in shaderpacks, and select Firmament in Iris. Start with High and adjust the preset for your setup.

A project by PozziTiv4ik.