Koto

Koto 1.3 — The Big Update

The largest update Koto has ever received. Almost every part of the pack was reviewed, rewritten or rebuilt: the sky, the sun, the water, the shadows, the fog, the anti-aliasing, the Nether, the End and the performance of every preset.

NEW

Hand light — hold a torch, lantern, glowstone or any light block and it lights up the world around you, with the same falloff as placed light. Soul torches and soul lanterns glow cyan. New sun — a square pixel-art sun, matching vanilla and the Koto moon, whose colour follows the time of day: deep orange at the horizon, golden in the morning and evening, warm white at noon. New water — a completely new wave model with golden-angle crest waves, deep-water wave speeds, calm and rough patches, and raindrop rings when it rains. Water level of detail — distant water fades smoothly into a calm mirror instead of sparkling with pixels. New edge smoothing — Koto's own edge filter follows the direction of each edge and smooths only along it. New filmic colour curve — soft shadows, natural mid-tones and highlights that roll off to white instead of clipping. Golden-hour clouds — clouds take the colour of the sun at sunrise and sunset, with a brighter silver lining towards the light. Wider support — Minecraft 1.20.1 up to 26.3, with fallbacks for older Iris versions. Dedicated outline program — the block selection outline now has its own shader.

IMPROVED

Shadows — rebalanced shadow-map distortion: distant shadow texels are about 3x smaller, with no more blocky shadows on mountains. Hardware-filtered soft shadows with no noise. Texel-scaled bias removes shadow acne. The penumbra grows with distance for smooth far shadows. Volumetric fog — fog quality now scales with the preset, filtered by a new depth-aware pass so no grain reaches blocks, sky or clouds. It no longer creates straight-edged light panels outside the shadow map. Overworld haze — much thinner fog, especially in the morning. The sun and the landscape are no longer washed out. Clouds — smooth cloud texture filtering removed square panels in the sky. About 35% fewer clouds for clearer skies. Nether — ambient light raised to 1.55x, so terrain is readable without losing the atmosphere. The End — ambient light raised to 1.4x, so the island is readable under the aurora. Presets — now cycle in the right order: Potato, Low, Medium, High, Super. The shadow range is tuned per preset, and the menu only shows the presets for a simpler setup. Reflections — reflection history is rejected on fast camera turns, with no more smearing on block edges.

FIXED

Flickering and blinking pixels on textures when the camera stops or moves Grain and dots on blocks in the End, the Nether and on clouds Purple and coloured glow halos around Endermen, mobs and objects Ghost trails behind moving mobs and waving plants Glass, ice, slime and honey showing random screen pixels that changed when turning the camera Block outline turning yellow, orange or red from sunlight, torches and hand light Sky glow appearing away from the sun Super preset not being recognised by Iris Ochre froglight not emitting light Foliage waving and light sources missing on older Iris versions (1.20.1 – 1.20.6) Grass not recognised on Minecraft 1.20.1 – 1.20.2 Pale Garden sky breaking the pack on versions before 1.21.4 Edge smoothing option failing to compile when switched off

PERFORMANCE

Volumetric fog on Medium is about 4x lighter (24 steps with 1 shadow sample, instead of 35 steps with 3) 14 empty full-screen passes removed The shadow map only renders chunks inside the shadow range Unused ambient occlusion work removed from translucent, particle and vanilla-AO paths The pack is 3 MB smaller after removing an external noise texture

Koto by Kotoritos · © 2026 Kotoritos · ARR (All Rights Reserved).