Solstice

v1.5

Materials alpha

• Added a shared lightweight material library with LabPBR 1.3 normal, AO, perceptual smoothness, F0/metal, and emissive decoding; absent maps retain a neutral matte fallback
• Added Natural and Pronounced built-in material styles; the stronger choice only changes generated vanilla metal/polished smoothness and never alters LabPBR resource-pack data
• Terrain, entities, and the hand/held-item pass now use tangent-space normals and an inexpensive GGX/Smith/Schlick direct response without replacing the existing lighting model
• Extended the material path to translucent water and glass: genuine resource-pack normal detail can perturb procedural water without flattening absent-map waves, while glass reads LabPBR normal, AO, F0, smoothness, and emission channels
• Added conservative built-in metal and polished-mineral classes for vanilla textures; ordinary stone, wood, soil, and foliage deliberately remain matte
• Reused colortex3 for opaque material normals/reflection strength, with separate class ranges for opaque materials, portals, puddles, and water
• Added Off / Sky Only / SSR material reflection tiers and profile defaults: Low compiles materials out, Medium uses sky reflections, and High/Ultra permit material SSR
• Added a dedicated Materials options page with Built-in / LabPBR Resource Pack source and specular-strength controls

Distant Horizons

• Added dedicated compatibility-profile dh_terrain, dh_water, and future-ready dh_shadow programs for the Overworld, Nether, and End
• DH terrain reuses Solstice's sky light, block light, weather color, cloud shadows, foliage response, emissive classification, and dimension lighting
• Added distance-filtered world-space material detail for grass/leaves, stone, deepslate, wood, dirt, sand, snow, terracotta, Nether stone, metal, and lava; this restores surface breakup where Iris cannot expose block-atlas UVs to the DH shader path
• Corrected DH grass blocks being treated as translucent foliage and metal being treated as emissive; metal now receives a restrained broad highlight instead
• DH water uses biome color, Solstice's user water tint, distance-stable waves, physical Fresnel, sky reflections, light glints, and transparent blending
• Native and DH depth now share one scene-classification/reconstruction helper
• Atmospheric fog preserves the native look near the player, thins beyond the native horizon for readable vistas, and dissolves only at the outer DH render edge
• Clear-weather DH atmosphere was opened further so distant landforms retain colour and contrast; rain, thunder, dawn mist, and dimension atmosphere remain denser
• Added a defensive Overworld cave-face rejection for fully enclosed DH geometry below sea level, preventing stale cave LODs from leaking through the native/DH handoff
• Very distant DH color now receives restrained aerial chroma/contrast compression, reducing fluorescent repeated color across large LOD triangles
• Clouds and half-resolution reconstruction no longer mistake LOD silhouettes for sky
• Light-shaft occlusion, underwater absorption, and native-water SSR now see DH geometry
• Sun glare now uses a soft 16-point visibility probe plus angular broad/core response, so terrain occlusion and crossing the player's FOV edge fade continuously instead of switching the effect off
• SSAO, puddle metadata, and material-style surface effects remain native-only, avoiding wasted work and false seams on low-detail LOD meshes
• DH shadows are deliberately disabled until their all-LOD pass meets the performance budget; the depth-only program is present for future profiling
• Base rendering remains guarded by Iris's DISTANT_HORIZONS feature macro, preserving the existing non-DH path

Weather and color

• Volumetric cloud bodies now combine vertically decorrelated erosion fields with flatter bases, taller coverage-driven tops, and billowed internal density instead of extruding one 2D weather shape through the entire layer
• Reduced first-hit cloud extinction so the march reveals multiple illuminated density layers; High and Ultra add a second long-range sunlight probe, while clear-sky bounce and an inexpensive multiple-scattering floor keep shadowed daytime lobes blue-white rather than charcoal without brightening storm clouds
• Underwater sky rays now use solid depth behind the water surface to generate and merge the same cloud layer seen above water; water extinction and the Snell window attenuate that layer afterwards, so submerged views can no longer reveal a cloud-covered moon
• The shared sun/moon visibility probe now multiplies terrain visibility by resolved cloud transmittance, keeping celestial discs, halos, glare, and light shafts consistent
• Rebuilt shooting stars as sub-second meteors with a compact warm head, narrow tapered blue-white plasma trail, breakup flicker, and one shared life envelope; the old multi-second moving glow segment and lingering-looking smear are gone
• Stars, meteors, moonlight, and the lunar halo now use the smoothed weather state, preventing celestial clarity from snapping ahead of cloud recovery after rain
• Rain atmosphere now uses an Iris-smoothed weather state: storms close visibility quickly, while fog, cloud cover, lighting, reflections, and sun glare recover gradually for twelve seconds after rain instead of revealing the full DH landscape at once
• Rain/DH fog is substantially denser at long range, matching the short visibility expected from humid heavy weather while preserving nearby silhouettes
• Added Natural and Vivid color grades alongside the legacy Classic response; Natural is the new default and tone-maps luminance rather than RGB channels independently, preserving hue through highlights
• Natural grading applies restrained highlight/shadow chroma compression, gamut compression, and weather-aware white balance; default saturation is now neutral rather than boosted
• Cloud macro shaping no longer suppresses an enormous low-frequency region around the camera column, removing the persistent clear crater seen when looking straight upward
• DH water now rejects pixels covered by native opaque depth and fades in across the native water range, preventing ocean bands from drawing across portals, terrain, and builds
• Top-down DH water now matches native water's 2% normal-incidence Fresnel, body tint, and transparency instead of becoming a bright, highly reflective sheet
• Underwater extinction now follows the Water Murkiness setting for native and DH geometry; suspended-particle haze closes long-distance visibility, and the water surface softly limits the above-water scene to a physical Snell window instead of exposing the entire world
• The defensive DH cave filter now rejects fully enclosed zero-skylight Overworld LOD faces at any elevation, covering modded caves and incomplete world-generation columns
• Sunrise atmospheric color is now confined around the sun instead of reflecting as a straight neon horizon band; twilight cloud bodies stay neutral while their lit edges warm

Capture-driven performance

• Used an AMD RenderDoc counter capture to identify the full-resolution effect merge, volumetric clouds, final output, atmosphere/water, and AO mask as the meaningful Solstice post costs; the already inexpensive bloom and portal-blur passes were left unchanged
• Reworked cloud reconstruction to use its existing alpha coverage instead of rereading native and DH depth for every neighbouring half-resolution texel
• The final effect merge now builds half-resolution coordinates once and shares native depth samples between surface effects and light shafts, while underwater shafts continue using the solid depth hierarchy
• The merge reads the existing 1×1 celestial visibility result and skips all shaft-buffer reconstruction when the light source is off-screen, fully occluded, or otherwise inactive
• FXAA reuses the final pass's existing centre colour instead of sampling it twice at full resolution
• Volumetric cloud rays now hoist weather and lighting constants out of the density loop; primary density remains evaluated at every step while the smoother solar-occlusion probe is reused for one adjacent occupied step through the existing temporal reconstruction
• The terrain path now reuses its vertex distance and per-fragment direct-light colour, removing repeated length, celestial normalization, and weather-light calculations from the indexed chunk draws highlighted by the capture

Gameplay polish

• Added Survival, Balanced, and Builder lighting styles as a visual preference independent of Low/Medium/High/Ultra; the modes adjust night illumination, sky-light response, block light falloff, held light, and interior indirect floors without changing daytime exposure
• Renamed Night Darkness to Night Brightness so the slider direction is unambiguous
• Added optional low-strength contrast-adaptive sharpening after FXAA, with neighborhood clamping and flat-region rejection to restore texture clarity without strong sky noise or edge halos; underwater sharpening is skipped

Render paths and Minecraft 26.2

• Added explicit lightweight programs for damaged blocks, block entities, translucent block entities, beacons, items, particles, translucent particles, translucent entities, lightning/dragon beams, armor glint, emissive eyes, and translucent held objects in the Overworld, Nether, and End; lines deliberately use Iris's documented gbuffers_line to gbuffers_basic fallback
• Translucent entity and block-entity passes retain forward lighting but no longer write opaque material/SSR records into colortex3
• Added item.properties and separate main/off-hand light evaluation, allowing warm, soul-blue, redstone-red, amethyst/end-purple, and plant-orange held-light colors
• Replaced hardcoded cutout thresholds with Iris's alphaTestRef in terrain, entity, hand, generic textured, lit textured, shadow, and special overlay paths
• Enabled Iris's separated translucent entity/block-entity draws and mixed particle ordering; beacon beams remain non-depth-writing so they cannot carve holes through fog
• Expanded current content metadata for Spring to Life foliage, golden dandelions, pale-garden plants and lights, trial spawners/vaults, copper bulbs, current emissive mobs, and the Minecraft 26.2 sulfur/cinnabar building families