Zepholume Shaders

A performance-conscious Minecraft Java shader pack built to give survival worlds richer lighting, stronger depth and a more cohesive atmosphere without casually setting the GPU budget on fire.

Zepholume is built around a deliberately simple idea: Minecraft does not need a gigantic cinematic rendering pipeline to look substantially better.

The project spends its rendering budget on controlled lighting, environmental colour, sky and horizon treatment, fog, clouds, weather, water and scene depth while keeping the rendering route deliberately bounded.

The goal is not to win a checklist competition against heavyweight shaders. The goal is to make normal Minecraft exploration, building and survival feel richer while respecting frame time, portability and maintainability.

V1.0.5 builds on the Phase 10 development candidate with source-level lighting corrections, more reliable shader-settings metadata and expanded automated checks. It targets the overly bright or overly harsh scenes reported during development without replacing Zepholume's restrained direct-path renderer.

• Corrected lightmap sampling. A source-level fix addresses missing lightmap sampling in affected generic fragment paths, a root cause of scenes behaving as though environmental light levels were ignored.
• Adjusted skylight treatment. Lighting calculations were reviewed to avoid unintended duplicate skylight effects and preserve environmental attenuation.
• Refined colour handling. Low-light values and above-range highlights receive more deliberate treatment to address excessive contrast and loss of darker scene detail.
• Fixed Iris option-tooltip keys. Phase 10 corrects shader-setting tooltip definitions to match the documented Iris format and adds a regression check.
• Kept the five intended quality profiles. Potato, Low, Balanced, High and Ultra remain the design targets; actual Potato-menu visibility still needs hands-on confirmation.
• Expanded validation. Phase 10 reports 272 standalone GLSL stage checks, 420 link checks and 630 mocked portability cases, alongside settings regression checks.
• Preserved the lightweight approach. No new shadow pipeline, SSR, temporal buffers or heavyweight post-processing system is introduced as part of this release.

This public release is based on Zepholume-Shaders-1.0.5-dev-phase10.zip, distributed as Zepholume-Shaders-1.0.5.zip. The development archive's recorded SHA-256 is 4B3803CF87AF43952CF91D145BB634C3346DEF6FC8C7008C37368058DC75DC91.

The selected profile establishes a feature baseline. Lower overrides can reduce work without intentionally enabling effects above the chosen tier. The five tiers are defined in the pack; Potato preset visibility in the live options menu is still awaiting verification.

Ultra Lite remains available as a deprecated compatibility alias for Low. And if Balanced looks excellent while running better, use Balanced. Selecting Ultra is still not a moral achievement.

Read the full Quality Profile guide

These archived comparisons show the project's visual direction at the time they were captured. They are not V1.0.5 before-and-after validation images and should not be treated as proof of the current lighting corrections.

A beautiful still image means very little if playing the game feels awful.

Zepholume therefore treats shader cost, frame-time behaviour, stability, portability and maintainability as design constraints from the beginning. Lower profiles compile out optional work while higher tiers increase bounded analytical quality instead of activating an entirely different renderer.

V1.0.5 makes no specific FPS or frame-time uplift claim. Its direct-path architecture and retained water zero-gating aim to avoid unnecessary work, but only controlled in-game GPU measurements can establish real performance differences.

The current architecture intentionally avoids heavyweight systems whose cost or complexity does not fit the project's goals:

• no shadow-map pipeline;
• no screen-space reflections;
• no SSAO pipeline;
• no bloom pipeline;
• no temporal-history or TAA system;
• no volumetric-lighting pipeline;
• no ray tracing;
• no compute-shader passes;
• no geometry or tessellation shader stages;
• no SSBO/image pipeline;
• no collection of unnecessary full-resolution intermediate colour buffers;
• no heavyweight post-processing chain.

These are intentional architectural boundaries. Zepholume aims for strong visual return from a restrained renderer instead of treating GPU time like an unlimited credit card.

Architectural efficiency is not the same thing as measured FPS. Real performance still depends on GPU, resolution, render distance, driver, loader, mods, resource packs and the scene being rendered.

Read the Architecture documentation

The Phase 10 candidate expands Zepholume's automated source, configuration and portability checks. These results help catch compilation and configuration regressions before a shader pack reaches users; they are not a replacement for an actual Minecraft render test.

• 272 GLSL stage checks passed in the standalone automated validation workflow.
• 420 link checks passed for evaluated program combinations.
• 630 mocked portability cases passed across the maintained static configurations.
• Phase 10 adds regression checking for documented Iris tooltip-key formatting.
• Quality-profile and dimension paths are exercised using generated source/configuration variants.
• Structural safeguards continue to check the restrained shader program architecture.
• The development release archive was reported with 135 entries; the published file is a renamed Phase 10 release candidate.

V1.0.5 targets the Iris/Oculus-style shader ecosystem. The project has separate static validation targets and staged runtime test lanes; none should be mistaken for full in-game qualification of this release.

• Minecraft 1.20.1 • Fabric: Iris 1.7.6 + Sodium 0.5.13 are staged in the documented test environment. Phase 10 visual rendering and profile-menu checks remain unverified.
• Minecraft 1.20.1 • Forge: Oculus 1.8.0 + Embeddium 0.3.31 are staged in the documented test environment. Phase 10 visual rendering and profile-menu checks remain unverified.
• Minecraft 26.2 • Fabric / NeoForge: Iris 1.11.2 appears in the project's documented static-validation targets; V1.0.5 has not been qualified through live rendering on these configurations.
• Minecraft 26.2 • Forge: Oculus Community Port 0.3.0-beta.1 remains experimental; documented partial gbuffers_* support does not justify a full Zepholume compatibility claim.
• Other Minecraft versions, including 26.3: no broad V1.0.5 compatibility claim is made without version-specific validation.
• Java: Java 17 is used in the documented Minecraft 1.20.1 runtime test environments.
• OptiFine: not supported or tested for V1.0.5.

Compatibility depends on the exact Minecraft version, shader loader, graphics driver and mod combination. A game's version appearing in project metadata is not proof that this particular ZIP has passed its runtime test.

Please report clear reproduction steps, the exact loader version, and screenshots when you encounter rendering problems.

Compatibility report • Known issues

1. Use a compatible Minecraft instance with an appropriate Iris or Oculus-style shader setup.
2. Download Zepholume-Shaders-1.0.5.zip.
3. Place the ZIP directly inside that Minecraft instance's shaderpacks directory.
4. Launch Minecraft and open the shader-pack menu.
5. Select Zepholume Shaders.
6. Start with Balanced. Move to Low/Potato when reducing GPU cost, or High/Ultra when you have comfortable headroom.

Do not extract the release ZIP. For compatibility testing, a disposable or isolated Minecraft instance is strongly preferable to turning your 300-mod survival installation into a laboratory experiment.

Read the current README & install notes

For low FPS or frame-time trouble, move down one Zepholume profile first and compare the same scene using the same graphics settings. Also check resolution, render distance, simulation distance, resource packs and other rendering-heavy mods.

For shader loading, compilation, missing profiles, excessive contrast or visual corruption:

• verify that you are actually testing Zepholume-Shaders-1.0.5.zip;
• verify your exact Minecraft and Iris/Oculus versions;
• check Sodium/Embeddium and Fabric/Forge/NeoForge versions where applicable;
• confirm the ZIP is inside the correct instance's shaderpacks directory;
• check the GPU driver if the problem appeared after a driver update;
• reproduce the problem in the smallest practical instance without unrelated rendering mods or resource packs;
• test shader reloads and dimension transitions when reporting intermittent problems;
• for V1.0.5, report whether Potato appears in the options menu and capture the affected scene if brightness or contrast looks wrong;
• when testing a newer Minecraft version, distinguish a source/static-validation target from a version that has actually completed runtime qualification.

Known issues • Report an issue

Zepholume is developed in public. The repository contains the maintained shader source, changelog, validation tooling, architecture documentation, profile definitions, performance-development evidence, compatibility documentation and manual runtime-test protocols.

GitHub Repository • Changelog • Architecture • Profiles • Compatibility • Issues

Screenshots are archival examples of Zepholume at capture time, not confirmed V1.0.5 results. Visual tuning, optimisation and compatibility work can continue between releases.