LiteCraft Shader

LiteCraft Shaders v2.0 New Features & Improvements Enhanced Shadows & Ambient Occlusion: Upgraded to a high-resolution 2048 shadow map with a 112-block distance, featuring 16-tap rotated soft shadows and a robust 16-tap, two-scale contact ambient occlusion system by default.

Atmospheric Sky & Fog System: A dynamic atmosphere model featuring overcast grey skies and rain fog, warm cinematic sunsets, deep blue nights with a faint horizon glow, and distance fog seamlessly matched to the sky.

Lighting Enhancements: Includes dynamic handheld lighting, foliage subsurface scattering for realistic light transmission through leaves, and realistic cloud shadows cast onto the terrain.

Advanced Water Rendering: Features multi-layered wave motion with distance-smoothed normals, depth-based light absorption for crystal-clear shallows, underwater sun caustics, Snell's window refraction, and refined specular glints.

Volumetric Cloud System: A rich multi-layered cloud setup combining volumetric coverage banks, detailed silver linings, and a high-altitude altostratus cloud layer.

Performance-Optimized Bloom: Emissive mask and mip-chain blur bloom supporting light sources like torches, lava, celestial bodies, mob glowing eyes, and glowing ores.

Dynamic Weather & Wet Surfaces: Rain brings darkened, saturated, and glossy block surfaces complete with reactive reflective puddles and ripple effects. Snow is now correctly isolated (no longer wet/glossy) and sparkles exclusively in direct sunlight.

Expanded Emissive Materials: Full emissive support added for lava, glowstone, sea lanterns, froglights, lamps, torches, lanterns, campfires, candles, and all mineral ores (Redstone, Lapis, Diamond, Emerald, Gold).

Advanced Visual Quality Controls: Added depth-only plane-fitted contact AO and smooth eye adaptation with gradual dark adaptation.

Immersive Night Sky & Dimensions: Detailed Milky Way galaxy band, animated aurora borealis (configurable: off/snowy/everywhere), rain-hidden stars, thick biome-colored fog and bounce-lighting in the Nether, and an animated nebula in the End with world-fixed twinkling stars.

labPBR Standard Support: Full compatibility with specular (_s) smoothness, metallicity, emissive, normal (_n) maps, and baked ambient occlusion.

Menu & Quality Integration: All new features are fully configurable across dedicated settings menus (Bloom/AO/Exposure, Materials & Rain, Night Sky & Dimensions) and integrated into all four preset quality profiles.

What it changes Lighting follows a natural day cycle. Morning and evening are orange, noon is white-blue, and night is blue, with deeper blue shadows. Torch and block light are bright up close and fall off quickly. Colors lose saturation in darkness, at night, and in rain. Exposure is fixed, not automatic: day stays readable, and night, caves, and rain get a small boost. The End is left as before. The Nether takes its light color from the biome fog. The sky has a shaded sun and moon that redden near the horizon, with real moon phases. Night stars are brighter and denser, meteors appear sometimes, and snowy biomes can show a green-blue-purple aurora at night. Version 3.1 fixes a white sheet behind the horizon. Minecraft’s sky dome used to stop a little above the horizon, so fog color showed through as a blank white band. The dome is now drawn below the horizon and filled with the shader’s own horizon color. Below the horizon the sky is no longer mirrored, and clouds are only calculated above it. Clouds are volumetric and drawn on the sky dome, not on vanilla cloud cubes. The default style is a layered, puffy look. A second style is available, plus the older LiteCraft mesh clouds (style 50) and plain vanilla clouds (style 0). They react to clear weather, rain, thunder, snow biomes, and dry biomes, and blend into one gray sheet in rain. Fancy clouds in the video settings are not required for the volumetric styles. Water has fine waves from a noise texture, optional parallax, surface motion, its own color and transparency, water fog, sun and moon glints, and underwater distortion. Sky reflections use a Fresnel term and show only the LiteCraft sky, without clouds or aurora. Refraction, screen-space reflections, caustics, and colored water shadows are left out on purpose, because they need extra passes. Other effects: soft sun and moon shadows, waving grass, crops, and leaves, rain streaks with a glass-like highlight and a little wind drift, snow sparkle in direct sun, light rays through trees and fog (stronger and bluer underwater), a light vignette, optional motion blur, and glowing mob eyes — enderman purple, spider red, phantom green.

LiteCraft Shaders v1.2 is for Minecraft Java with Iris, tuned for weak cards such as a GT 730 with 2 GB. Only the water surface changed in this version.

Water is no longer a flat coloured plane.

• Fine ripples come from a noise texture, in Worley or Perlin.
• Wave parallax shifts the ripple pattern with the view angle, so the surface has more depth.
• The surface moves with the wind.
• Colour, brightness, and transparency are set by the shader. A vanilla-texture mode is there if you want the old look mixed in.
• Water fog is always on while you are underwater. It can also tint the view looking down through the surface.
• Sun and moon glint is a GGX highlight, so the sparkle sits on the wave facing the light.
• The screen wobbles gently while the camera is underwater.
• Sky reflection uses a Fresnel curve. At a shallow angle the water mirrors the sky. Looking straight down shows the water colour. The reflection uses LiteCraft’s own sky. Clouds and light rays are not drawn in it.

Left out on purpose, so the pack stays on one post-process pass: refraction, screen-space reflections, water caustics, and coloured shadows through water.

The new page is Waving & Water, then Water Surface. Options are Sky Reflection, Sun Glint Strength, Wave Normals (None, Worley, or Perlin; normals cost 8 texture reads per water pixel), Wave Parallax (8 more reads, off by default, only Pretty turns it on), Bumpiness, Detail, Sharpness, Ripple Speed, Pixel Lock, Water Texture Mode, Water Alpha Mode, Water Fog, fog density, underwater distortion, and the colour controls.

The default water colour is a clear blue-green. Intensity is 0.70, tuned so water stays about as bright as in the previous version.

Potato turns off fine ripples, sky reflection, parallax, and underwater distortion. Fast and Balanced turn reflection and Worley ripples on, with no parallax. Pretty matches that and adds parallax.