🌌 AuraLite Shaders (Minecraft 1.16 – 26.2)

AuraLite is a modern, lightweight, and highly optimized shader pack built on top of the OpenGL 4.6 / GLSL 460 standard. It is specifically designed and tested for Minecraft 1.16 – 26.2 with Sodium + Iris (and compatible with OptiFine, Oculus).

AuraLite delivers a breathtaking, realistic visual experience without overcomplicating the screen with bloated post-processing effects (such as aggressive motion blur or heavy bloom). A lightweight HDR bloom (gaussian pyramid since v1.1.3, half-resolution and skippable since v1.1.4) softly glows emissive sources without smearing the scene. Optional FXAA/SMAA anti-aliasing, SSR, TAA, godrays, and SSAO are profile-scaled so AuraLite keeps high FPS and smooth frametimes on modern GPUs.

🧪 v1.1.4 note: Adds tiny physical-atmosphere LUTs (begin/begin1 → 64×32 colortex5 + 32×16 colortex6), a hard Distant Horizons seam (the v1.1.3 screen-door dither punched white holes on DH 3.2), DH-aware TAA with a material reactive mask, a Gerstner water spectrum, half-res schedulable bloom, and an Iris 1.7.6 compatibility workaround (dhShadow.enabled=false by default). TAA remains on by default in HIGH/ULTRA/EXTREME; camera jitter stays OFF. See changelog below.

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ℹ️ Historical note: older changelog sections below are preserved as original release notes.

🚀 What's New in v1.1.4 — Atmosphere LUTs, Distant Horizons Seam Fix & Half-Res Bloom

Version 1.1.4 rebuilds the experimental physical sky around shared low-frequency LUTs, replaces the hole-producing DH screen-door seam with a deterministic hand-off, and cuts post-process cost with skippable half-resolution bloom. It also finishes the TAA story for Distant Horizons (correct DH reprojection + Halton jitter on LOD geometry) and swaps glittery water fBm for a coherent Gerstner swell.

🧪 Shared Physical-Atmosphere LUTs (begin / begin1)

• Tiny HDR LUTs, not fullscreen buffers. v1.1.3 deleted unused full-screen colortex5/colortex6 to save VRAM. v1.1.4 brings them back as 64×32 solar-transmittance (colortex5) and 32×16 multi-scatter / ground-bounce (colortex6) tables — kilobytes, not megabytes.
• begin.fsh rebuilds direct solar transmittance every frame: sun elevation on X (−0.16…1.0, including civil twilight), camera altitude on Y (0–30 km), Kasten–Young airmass × Rayleigh + aerosol extinction, zeroed below the night hemisphere.
• begin1.fsh layers bounded multi-scattering and biome-aware ground bounce on top of that transmittance. Noon is Rayleigh-blue; low sun is warm; swamp/snow/vegetation tints come from GROUND_BOUNCE_MODE.
• Shared by every physical-sky consumer — gbuffers_skybasic, terrain fog, water analytic reflection, volumetric godrays, clouds and the SSR sky fallback all sample the same LUTs instead of each running a second atmosphere march.
• When SKY_MODE=0 (every shipped profile) the LUT passes write constants and cost almost nothing. Enable Physical Sky manually in the Experimental tab.

New Experimental → Atmosphere options (off-profile defaults stay cinematic / auto):

• ATMOSPHERE_TURBIDITY — Crisp / Balanced / Hazy aerosol load.
• ATMOSPHERE_SCALE — Compact 25 m / Balanced 50 m / Cinematic 100 m per block (how Minecraft Y maps into atmosphere kilometres).
• GROUND_BOUNCE_MODE — Auto (biome-aware) / Neutral Soil / Vegetation / Snow / Desert.
• SKY_TEMPORAL — rotation-only history blend for the sky (requires TAA). Physical sky uses a higher history weight than the animated gradient sky so stars/aurora do not trail.

The swamp detector now also matches BIOME_MANGROVE_SWAMP.

🌍 Distant Horizons — Hard Seam, TAA & Iris Workaround

⚠️ AuraLite still does NOT claim full Distant Horizons compatibility. v1.1.4 is a targeted correctness pass on the v1.1.2/v1.1.3 experimental path.

• Hard deterministic hand-off at far. The v1.1.3 16 m screen-door dither discarded random LOD fragments in the seam band; on DH 3.2 those holes showed sky/white whenever vanilla geometry did not fill the same pixel. DH fragments with dist < far are now simply discarded — less cinematic, never stochastic.
• DH receives the same optional Halton camera jitter as vanilla gbuffers. composite1.fsh reprojects DH pixels through dhProjectionInverse + dhPreviousProjection (vanilla matrices have the wrong far plane).
• Conservative DH history cap (0.45) — LOD meshes change topology as chunks stream; they participate in TAA but cannot leave long trails.
• DH_BLOCK_ILLUMINATED tag colortex2.a = 0.24 — distant sea lanterns / glowstone stay self-emissive even when they are not lava-orange or portal-violet. Extra DH material classes: DIRT, SAND, TERRACOTTA.
• dh_water now honours WATER_WAVES / riffles / transparency / specular, applies the frozen-ocean navy floor, and occludes against dhDepthTex1 (plus Iris depthtex1 via view-space Z, because raw depths use different projections).
• DH_SHADOW_RANGE — Seam (1.25×) / Extended (2×) / Far (4×) of vanilla far. LOD receivers can keep sampling the shared shadow map past the vanilla chunk edge.
• Shadow-map footprint rebalanced for DH: MED 192 m, HIGH/ULTRA 512 m, EXTREME 768 m (VERY_LOW/LOW stay 60 m, no shadows).
• dhShadow.enabled=false by default. DH 3.2.0-b + Iris 1.7.6 can replace/cull the vanilla terrain shadow pass — symptom: mob shadows remain, block shadows vanish even in vanilla chunks. Users with a verified working Iris/DH bridge can turn the DH shadow pass back on and then use DH_SHADOW_RANGE.

🎯 TAA — Sky Temporal Resolve & Material Reactive Mask

• Sky temporal resolve (SKY_TEMPORAL) — sky pixels have no stable world position, so history is reprojected with camera rotation only (no translation). Gradient-sky history weight is lower (0.28) than Physical (0.46) so clouds/aurora/meteors do not smear.
• Material reactive mask — water (0.8), foliage (0.62) and emissive/lava (< 0.5) cut history weight by 46% / 30% / 58%. Without a per-object velocity buffer this is what stops waving leaves and water from ghosting after TAA.

🌊 Gerstner Water Spectrum

• Replaces the v1.1.3 value-noise / fBm central-difference normal in final.fsh. That field was mathematically stable but read as high-frequency random glitter.
• A 4-direction travelling swell (dominant wind + cross swell + two low-amplitude ripples) produces analytic slopes and a calmer default surface. Amplitude is clamped to ±0.22.
• Near-water vertex swell is slightly reduced (0.04/0.02 → 0.032/0.016) so the geometric mesh matches the new reflection spectrum.
• Dead Voronoi lava-height helpers removed from gbuffers_water, gbuffers_terrain_translucent and gbuffers_terrain (lava stays texture-driven).

✨ Half-Resolution, Skippable HDR Bloom

• New master BLOOM toggle. VERY_LOW / LOW skip the entire 5-pass chain via program.composite3–7.enabled=BLOOM (Iris/OptiFine do not even dispatch the programs).
• colortex3/colortex4 are half-resolution (size.buffer = 0.5 0.5). Gaussian strides are doubled so the world-space radius stays the same; final.fsh linearly upsamples the glow.
• TAA similarly gates composite1/composite2, so lighter profiles no longer pay for unused fullscreen passes.

🌌 Aurora Quality

• New AURORA_QUALITY — Soft 8 / Balanced 12 / Silky 18 raymarch steps, with a centred globally-animated ray start (the previous per-pixel hash grain is gone).

🎚️ Profile Rebalance (v1.1.4)

Profile	Shadows	DH receivers	TAA	Bloom	Sky temporal
VERY_LOW / LOW	❌ 512 / 60 m	Seam	❌	❌	❌
MED	✅ 1024 / 192 m Balanced	Seam	❌	✅ Balanced	❌
HIGH	✅ 2048 / 512 m Balanced	Extended	✅	✅ Balanced	✅
ULTRA	✅ 4096 / 512 m Aggressive	Extended	✅	✅ Balanced	✅
EXTREME	✅ 8192 / 768 m Aggressive	Far	✅	✅ Strong	✅

Camera jitter remains off by default in every profile.

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🚀 What's New in v1.1.3 — True TAA, HDR Bloom Pyramid & Black-Water Regression Fix

Version 1.1.3 completes the TAA pipeline (Halton sub-pixel camera jitter + YCoCg variance clipping), replaces the old single-pass bloom with a true multi-octave HDR gaussian pyramid, and fixes the long-standing black-water regression with MRT-proof water detection. It also adds procedural raindrop rings, biome-aware murky swamp water, underwater plant sway, post-TAA sharpening, and a ~48 MB VRAM cleanup.

🎯 True Temporal Anti-Aliasing (Halton Jitter + YCoCg Clipping)

• Halton(2,3) sub-pixel camera jitter — every gbuffer vertex shader can offset gl_Position by a rotating 8-frame Halton pattern (±0.5 px). Previously TAA only blended history without jittering the sample point, so it could only blur noise instead of reconstructing sub-pixel detail.
• TAA_JITTER option — Off / Subtle / Standard / Strong (new in v1.1.3). The jitter is OFF by default in all profiles for a rock-steady image; Subtle (±0.25 px), Standard (±0.5 px) and Strong (±0.75 px) scale the amplitude for users who want the full sub-pixel reconstruction (removes high-frequency shimmer at the cost of a slight temporal wobble). Requires TAA enabled.
• Previous-frame jitter compensation in composite1.fsh — the old frame's offset is re-added to the reprojection (with the same strength scale), so static images converge instead of smearing ~0.5 px. Only active while jitter is on.
• YCoCg variance clipping (μ ± γσ) replaces the axis-aligned 3×3 min/max box — the old box caused ghost trails on saturated high-contrast edges (fences, wires, hot specular) while being too tight on flat gradients. Clip width scales with TAA_STRENGTH: 1.50 Light / 1.25 Balanced / 1.10 Stable.
• Frame-rotated IGN dithers now resolve cleanly — godrays and volumetric clouds rotate their interleaved-gradient-noise patterns per frame; with the temporal resolve they integrate into smooth gradients instead of shimmering.
• TAA is on by default in HIGH / ULTRA / EXTREME profiles (off on VERY_LOW / LOW / MED for maximum FPS); it can be toggled in the Post-Processing menu, and TAA_STRENGTH presets the variance-clip tightness.

✨ HDR Gaussian-Pyramid Bloom (composite3 – composite7)

• Replaces the v1.0.1 single-pass 3×3 neighbour glow, whose ~1.5 px radius could only produce a tight halo.
• New 5-pass chain: threshold brightpass (0.75 luma soft-knee, exposure-aware) → tight separable gaussian (9-tap, σ≈2.0) → wide separable gaussian (4× stride). Successive blurs compose to an effective σ ≈ 8.2 px — a soft cinematic falloff around the sun/moon disks, lava, portals and hot specular, without a mip chain.
• Runs after the TAA resolve, so the bloom energy is temporally stable.
• New HDR_BLOOM option (Subtle 0.06 / Balanced 0.12 / Strong 0.22 amplitude) wired into every quality profile.

💧 Black-Water Regression Fix — MRT-Proof Water Detection

• Root cause: on some Iris builds the translucent pass drops the colortex1/colortex2 MRT writes entirely — water then arrives with a zeroed normal + alpha + lightmap. The emissive fast-path (alpha < 0.5) swallowed it and every tag/lightmap-based system died with it.
• Detection ladder: primary = colortex2.a = 0.8 tag; rescue = the depth difference (depthtex1 solid-only vs depthtex0) proves a translucent surface on top, then a hue-fingerprint classifier on the albedo rejects portals (violet, green-starved) and lava (blue-starved) while accepting water (blue/blue-green, never pale). Water, ice and glass classify; torch flames, portal sparkles, squid ink, pale ice and clear glass do not.
• Synthesized flat water normal when the decoded normal is untrustworthy (MRT loss or clear value), so Fresnel/reflections still have sane inputs.
• Analytic sky reflection (waterSkyRefl) — zenith/horizon gradient + warm sun-side glow, dimension-aware (Overworld palette, Nether biome sheen, End violet sheen), applied via Schlick Fresnel with a 0.20 floor (pure F0≈0.02 at steep look-down angles was exactly what let shadowed water crush to black), multiplied by skyLight so cave water stays dark. This is the actual black-water fix and works with SSR disabled.
• Diffuse ambient floor for rescued pixels whose lightmap may read zero.
• Navy-tint floor in gbuffers_water/gbuffers_terrain_translucent — frozen-ocean biome tints (e.g. 0x3938C9) can no longer crush R/G to black after the gamma pipeline.
• WATER_DEBUG diagnostics overlay (Off / Classify / Lightmap / Raw tag alpha) — green = healthy tag, red = depth-rescued, yellow = rescued from the emissive path, magenta = lava/portal-guarded.

🪟 SSR & Refraction Fixes (final.fsh)

• Procedural sky fallback for reflection rays that leave the screen or hit the sky — previously black (the reason the waterMirrorBoost hack existed); now a day/night/sunset/storm-aware gradient with moon-phase brightness, Schlick-Fresnel weighting and edge fade.
• SSR march start moved 1.0 → 0.5 view units off the surface so the water plane at the player's feet still reflects near-field geometry.
• MRT-proof water detection reused for SSR/refraction (same hue guards as composite.fsh).
• Procedural raindrop rings on wet up-facing surfaces — two layers of expanding, world-stable circular waves perturb the SSR normal so rain reads as thousands of tiny ripples instead of one flat mirror.

🔍 Post-TAA Sharpening (POST_SHARPEN)

• Gentle 5-tap unsharp mask (0.18 amplitude, clamped ≥ 0) applied to the resolved image before refraction/SSR/bloom work, recovering texture detail softened by TAA's history blending. On in MED+ profiles.

☁️ Volumetric Clouds — Quality Scaling & Dithered Ray Start

• New CLOUD_QUALITY option: 8 / 12 / 16 raymarch steps (was hardcoded 12) — Cheap / Standard / High.
• Dithered ray start (frame-rotated IGN) on geometry pixels when TAA is enabled: the frame-rotating pattern is temporally resolved into a smooth volumetric integral, killing the 12-step ribbing on thick cumulus without the v0.2.5-era "swimming". Sky pixels keep the stable centred start.

🌿 Underwater Plants Sway

• New block class 10010 (seagrass, tall_seagrass, kelp, kelp_plant, sea_pickle) — fronds sway in a current, phase-shifted by height so the tips lag the base, storm-agitated along with the surface foliage path. Displacement is mirrored in shadow.vsh so shadows follow the visible fronds.

🌊 Biome-Aware Murky Water

• Smoothed swamp/mangrove detector (isSwampBiome) — swamp water absorbs more red and reads greener and murkier (absorption (0.23, 0.038, 0.10), deep colour pushed to dark green) instead of open-ocean blue.

🧪 Physical Sky — Warm Ground Bounce

• The experimental SKY_MODE=1 atmosphere now includes a warm ground-bounce term: terrain's ~15–20% mean albedo re-scatters in the lower atmosphere (strongest at the horizon and with a high sun), removing the "sterile" blue-bias horizon band.

🌇 Lighting & Ambience

• Rayleigh-tinted day ambient — the day hemisphere ambient now follows the actual sun extinction: golden-hour light is warm and blue-depleted instead of static grey-blue.
• Held-light temperature — strong held sources (sea lantern, glowstone, shroomlight, lava bucket) read slightly cooler than candle-strength light.

🌍 Distant Horizons — Soft Seam

• The v1.1.2 hard discard at far + 16 is replaced by a screen-door dithered transition band: DH LOD fragments stochastically blend into vanilla chunks over 16 m, so crossing the boundary or changing render distance no longer shows a hard cut. The pattern is static per frame (DH-only pixels are excluded from TAA history).

🛠️ Pipeline & VRAM Cleanup

• Removed colortex5/colortex6 format directives — never read or written, but each forced Iris/OptiFine to allocate a full RGBA16F screen buffer: ~32 MB saved @1080p, ~128 MB @4K.
• shadowcolor0Format RGBA16F → RGBA8 (it only carries LDR tex * glcolor): another ~16 MB @1080p / ~64 MB @4K.
• shadowcolor1Format removed (nothing ever wrote to it).
• colortex0Clear = true — no stale garbage on the first frame or after a window resize.
• colortex3/colortex4 are now actually used by the bloom pyramid; the full 8-buffer HDR pipeline is engaged.

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🚀 What's New in v1.1.2 — Render-Distance Shadows & Experimental Distant Horizons (Partial)

Version 1.1.2 extends shadow rendering to the actual render distance with an adaptive LOD system, fixes HDR/TAA pipeline strictness, cleans up deprecated GLSL, and introduces partial, experimental Distant Horizons support (WIP) — without claiming full compatibility yet. Work is ongoing.

🌗 Extended Shadow Distance with Adaptive LOD

• Shadows now reach render distance. shadowDistance was 60-160m with a hard cutoff at shadowDistance. Now it scales with quality profiles: 60m (VERY_LOW/LOW, no shadows) → 120m (MED) → 256m (HIGH/ULTRA) → 384m (EXTREME). The cutoff is replaced by a soft fade smoothstep(far*0.85, far*0.98).
• New SHADOW_LOD toggle — Off / Balanced / Aggressive. Reduces sample count and expands filter radius at distance to keep performance stable:
  • Balanced: >25% far → 16 samples ×1.8 radius, >50% → 8 ×2.8
  • Aggressive: >15% → 16×2.0, >35% → 8×3.5, >60% → 4×5.0
  • Beyond 95% far shadow sampling is skipped entirely.
• shadowMapResolution now includes 8192. EXTREME uses 8192 for maximum texel density at 384m. HIGH stays 2048, ULTRA 4096.
• New SHADOW_PCSS_BLUR toggle — fixed softness vs PCSS penumbra softening. When enabled, penumbra grows with blocker distance and rain. When disabled, shadows use constant softness.
• PCSS correctness fixes in composite.fsh:sampleShadow(): added UV bounds checks (prevents clamp-to-border artifacts), avgBlockerDepth clamped to 1e-4 to avoid NaN, penumbraSize clamped 0-2.0, lightSize reduced 140→40 to prevent light bleeding, actualSpread capped to 16.0, out-of-bounds samples counted as unshadowed (1.0) for correct averaging.
• Shadow bias distBias now scales with far instead of shadowDistance, plus extra water receiver bias for tagged water pixels (colortex2.a≈0.8).

🔧 HDR Pipeline Strictness Fix

• Dummy #define RGBA16F 0 guards added before the const int colortex*Format = RGBA16F directives. This satisfies strict GLSL validators (C1503 undefined variable RGBA16F) while Iris/OptiFine's parser still reads the format names (spec second clause). In v1.1.1 the directives were inside a /* */ comment and were ignored by some loaders.
• Now all used buffers are explicitly RGBA16F: colortex0/1/2 (main HDR + PBR + material tags), colortex3/4/5/6 (unused today but set to HDR for a full pipeline), colortex7 (TAA history, colortex7Clear=false), and optional shadowcolor0/1Format = RGBA16F.
• Cost noted: ~16MB per 1080p RGBA16F buffer → ~128MB VRAM for 8 buffers.

🌍 Experimental — Partial Distant Horizons Support (WIP, not full support)

⚠️ AuraLite does NOT yet claim full Distant Horizons compatibility. v1.1.2 only adds a minimal, experimental code path so LOD chunks are no longer invisible under Iris. It's functional enough for testing, but considered partial and work-in-progress.

• Why it was needed: Without dh_terrain.vsh/.fsh, dh_water.vsh/.fsh, dh_shadow.vsh/.fsh, Iris marks the pack as incompatible with DH and simply doesn't draw DH's simplified LOD chunks at all — symptom "shader works but DH chunks invisible". Presence of these files is enough for Iris/DH auto-detection (dhShadow.enabled defaults true).
• What v1.1.2 does:
  • dh_terrain/dh_water write the same colortex0/1/2 layout as vanilla passes, so existing lighting/fog/shadow/cloud/godray code in composite.fsh applies to LOD geometry without other changes.
  • Depth reconciliation in composite.fsh: detects depthtex0>=1.0 && dhDepthTex0<1.0 → isDHTerrain, reconstructs viewPos via dhProjectionInverse (not gbufferProjectionInverse — different far planes) and computes isSkyPixel. Fixes DH terrain being treated as sky (flat/washed-out).
  • Fog rescale: effectiveDensity *= far/dhRenderDistance prevents exponential fog from saturating to white before DH draw distance.
  • Emissive fast-path uses !isSkyPixel instead of depth<1.0 so distant DH_BLOCK_ILLUMINATED (glowstone/lanterns) is still emissive.
  • final.fsh heat shimmer now checks dhDepthTex0 via isRealGeometry so distant lava lakes also shimmer.
  • Overdraw prevention: if(dist < far+16.0) discard in DH passes — DH renders entire world including area already covered by vanilla chunks; without discard both fight over same G-buffer pixel causing Z-fighting / missing water/ice.
• Current limitations (why it's partial):
  • gl_MultiTexCoord2 is not guaranteed to carry valid lightmap data for DH programs — v1.1.2 hardcodes lmcoord = vec2(0.0,1.0) (open sky, no torch). Correct for exterior DH, but not interior-perfect.
  • No LabPBR normals/specular maps for DH — roughness/metalness approximated per dhMaterialId (STONE/WOOD/METAL/SNOW/LEAVES/LAVA...). No POM on DH.
  • Water uses flat vertex normal, not procedurally displaced like near water.
  • Fog/sky/cloud code paths are shared but DH has coarser geometry.
• Ongoing work: proper skylight baking if DH ever exposes it, LabPBR fallback, smoother transition seam, performance tuning. Full support will be announced separately.

🛠️ Pipeline Cleanup & Fixes

• Menu split fix — [v1.1.1-ui-hotfix]: Oversized option screens were split into [SHADOW_OPTIONS], [PBR_OPTIONS], [AO_REFLECTIONS], [CLOUD_SHAPE], [LIGHT_SHAFTS], [NIGHT_SKY] because some Iris/OptiFine UI builds silently hide buttons when a screen has too many entries.
• Deprecated ftransform() removed from composite.vsh, final.vsh, gbuffers_clouds.vsh, composite1.vsh, composite2.vsh, gbuffers_weather.vsh — replaced with explicit gl_ProjectionMatrix * gl_ModelViewMatrix * gl_Vertex for broader driver compat (same fix applied to shadow.vsh in v1.1.0).
• Final pass cleanup: Removed two duplicate copy-pasted post-gamma dither blocks that contradicted the comment about linear-space dither (triangle ±1/255 before tonemap). The single pre-tonemap dither remains — more effective in darks, silent in brights.
• Bias & stale comment fixes: Corrected stale colortex6 hand-off comment (removed in v1.0.3), now notes that final.fsh reads normal from colortex2 and roughness from colortex1.z.
• Rebalanced profiles to reflect new distances and LOD:
  • VERY_LOW/LOW 60m (no shadows), MED 120m Balanced, HIGH 256m Balanced, ULTRA 256m Aggressive, EXTREME 384m Aggressive + 8192 res.
• Localization: Bumped lang/*.lang headers v1.0.7 → v1.1.2, translated previously-English profile.*.comment placeholders into native languages (ur_pk, vi_vn, zh_cn, zh_hk, zh_tw and others).

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🆕 What's New in v1.1.0 — True Volumetric Godrays, HDR Pipeline & Experimental Physical Sky

Version 1.1.0 replaces the screen-space godray approximation with a fully volumetric raymarched implementation, switches the entire G-buffer pipeline to true HDR (RGBA16F), and introduces an experimental, fully physical realtime atmospheric-scattering sky mode as an opt-in alternative to the stable gradient sky. This is a focused two-pillar update on top of the v1.0.7 bug-fix baseline.

🌤️ True Volumetric Godrays

The old computeGodrays() screen-space approximation has been replaced by computeVolumetricGodrays() — a genuine single-scattering volumetric raymarch:

• Per-step shadow-map occlusion — every raymarch sample now tests the shadow map individually, so light shafts are actually carved by real geometry (trees, buildings, cave ceilings) instead of being implied by a "forward-looking boost" toward the sun.
• Interleaved Gradient Noise dithering (Jimenez 2014), rotated per-frame via the new frameCounter uniform when TAA is active — 8–24 raymarch steps now integrate as smoothly as hundreds, with no banding.
• Exact per-segment Beer–Lambert integration — Tr₀ · σs/σt · (1 − e^(−σt·Δx)) per step, which is energy-conserving regardless of step size (no more over-brightening at low sample counts).
• Dual-lobe Henyey-Greenstein phase function (forward + weak backscatter lobe) with an isotropic floor, so crepuscular rays stay visible when looking across them, not only when staring directly at the sun.
• Colored radiance — shafts are now warm Kelvin-driven sunbeams by day, deep orange at sunset, and faint blue moonbeams at night, instead of a flat white/yellow overlay.
• New GODRAYS_STRENGTH setting (Subtle / Balanced / Dramatic) added to every quality profile.
• GODRAYS_QUALITY sample counts and distances increased: Fast 8 samples/96m, Balanced 16/128m, High 24/160m (up from 4/72m, 6/110m, 8/150m in v1.0.7).

🌈 Full HDR G-Buffer Pipeline

• colortex0, colortex1, and colortex2 are now explicitly RGBA16F. Bright sources — the sun disk, lava, specular highlights, portals — no longer clip to 1.0 before tone mapping, so the ACES/AgX curves in final.fsh finally compress genuine HDR highlights instead of receiving pre-clamped input. Bloom now samples real HDR luminance rather than an already-saturated LDR buffer.
• colortex2's alpha channel carries a 5-value material tag (0.0/0.1/0.62/0.8/1.0); RGBA16F guarantees these are preserved exactly, whereas a lower-precision format would have aliased and collided material tags (e.g. foliage vs. water).
• Godray intensity constants were re-tuned (roughly halved vs. the old LDR values) now that the additive shaft survives in full instead of clipping against a saturated scene; a stronger soft shoulder (0.50 vs. the old 0.30) keeps the sun-facing core from blowing out under HDR.

🧪 Experimental: Realtime Physical Sky (Off by Default)

A brand-new [EXPERIMENTAL] menu tab exposes an alternate sky renderer in gbuffers_skybasic.fsh, disabled in every shipped profile (SKY_MODE=0) so the stable gradient sky remains the default:

• SKY_MODE — 0 (Gradient, legacy v1.0.7-style sky) or 1 (Physical Realtime): a genuine per-pixel ray-marched atmosphere with exact 1st-order single scattering (Rayleigh + Mie + Ozone, full sun-ray optical-depth march with ground-occlusion detection) plus a blue-biased, bounded multiple-scattering ambient term that fills in the zenith/horizon without producing the typical LUT-based "yellow band" artifact. No lookup textures, no cross-frame reads.
• SKY_QUALITY — controls raymarch sample counts (Fast 8×4 / Standard 12×6 / High 16×8) for the physical mode.
• SKY_STYLE — new artistic-direction toggle independent of SKY_MODE: Realistic (true angular sun/moon size, neutral colors, minimal glow — an authentic astronomy look), Semi-realistic (readable ×2.8 sun/moon size, richer color, soft aureole — the default), or Fantasy (grand ×5.5 sun/moon, huge corona, vivid saturated teal/crimson/indigo palette for a stylized sky).
• Physical mode renders the sun disk with real limb darkening and a physically-derived angular radius, and computes its color from actual sun-ray transmittance (ozone-aware) rather than the legacy Kelvin/airmass approximation.
• Because this feature is explicitly experimental and disabled by default, it introduces no behavioral change to any existing profile.

🛠️ Smaller Fixes & Cleanup

• Dark-sky/moon-halo banding fixed at the source — a linear-space triangle-distributed dither (±1/255, matching the BSL/Complementary technique) is now applied in final.fsh before tone mapping, where gamma expansion makes a tiny linear noise term large enough in the darks to smooth the gradient, while staying invisible in bright regions. The old post-gamma dither (which couldn't fix pre-tonemap banding) has been removed and replaced with an explicit final clamp().
• shadow.vsh no longer relies on the deprecated fixed-function ftransform(); it now builds the clip-space position explicitly via gl_ModelViewMatrix / gl_ProjectionMatrix for broader driver compatibility.
• Updated localization strings for GODRAYS, GODRAYS_QUALITY, and the new GODRAYS_STRENGTH / SKY_MODE / SKY_STYLE / SKY_QUALITY options and the new Experimental tab.

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🆕 What's New in v1.0.0 — Meteor Showers & Finalized Reflection Pipeline

Version 1.0.0 builds on the volumetric aurora work from v0.3.0 and introduces the first v1.0.0 source snapshot in this repository. The update adds a physically-inspired meteor system to the night sky, finalizes the modern SSR path for reliable Iris compatibility, and refreshes the documentation so the project now correctly points to the shaders v1.0.0/ folder.

☄️ Physically-Based Meteors / Falling Stars

• True great-circle sky arcs. Meteors are rendered as moving arcs on the celestial sphere instead of flat 2D streaks, so showers converge toward a shared radiant like real meteor photography.
• Ablation-based brightness curve. Each meteor rises, peaks, and fades with a bell-shaped light curve inspired by atmospheric entry.
• Blackbody plasma colouring. Meteor heads are tinted with the same Kelvin-based colour pipeline used by AuraLite's sun/moon lighting, giving physically consistent warm-to-white fireball tones.
• Moonlight washout and weather attenuation. Faint meteors are suppressed by bright moon phases, rain, and daytime sky brightness, improving realism and avoiding visual clutter in poor visibility.
• Persistent trains on bright fireballs. The strongest events leave a short-lived glowing ionization trail, including a subtle green oxygen-style tint on the lingering train.
• Available in both Overworld and The End. Overworld meteors respect moonlight and atmosphere; End meteors render against the permanent night sky without moon washout.

🪞 Finalized v1.0.0 SSR / Water Reflection Path

• colortex6 fully removed from the reflection workflow. The older MRT export path was retired; final.fsh now reads normals directly from colortex2 and roughness from colortex1, matching AuraLite's already-working PBR data path.
• Depth-based water-surface detection. Water is identified by comparing depthtex0 and depthtex1, making reflections robust on Iris paths where water G-buffer writes may be inconsistent.
• More stable water normals. Reflection normals are reconstructed from neighbouring depth samples and then perturbed with coherent world-space ripple gradients, reducing faceting and torn reflections.
• Cleaner post-pass reliability. The reflection pipeline now lives entirely in the final post-processing pass, simplifying the frame graph and avoiding loader-specific MRT issues.

🎛️ New Sky Settings & Profile Integration

• New configurable options: SHOOTING_STARS, SHOOTING_STARS_FREQUENCY, and SHOOTING_STARS_BRIGHTNESS.
• Shooting stars are disabled on the lightest presets and enabled from MED upward through the normal profile system.
• English and Russian UI text was expanded for the new night-sky controls, while other language files continue to fall back safely.

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🆕 Recap — What landed in v0.2.6 — License Migration & Version Support

Version 0.2.6 is a legal protection and compatibility update. It migrates the project license to a copyleft non-commercial model to protect AuraLite from unauthorized commercial redistribution, adds copyright assertions to all source files, and officially expands tested compatibility.

⚖️ License Migration to CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

• MIT to CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — Migrated the project's license from MIT to Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International. AuraLite is now legally protected against commercial reuse and unauthorized sales (e.g. on third-party launchers/portals).
• Copyright Asserted — Explicitly declared copyright: Copyright (c) 2026 AlexanderNyr.
• Embedded Code Headers — Embedded copyright headers (// AuraLite Shaders - Copyright (c) 2026 AlexanderNyr. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.) into all GLSL shader files (.fsh, .vsh), block properties (.properties), and translation tables (.lang).
• Rules & Permissions FAQ — Added a clear FAQ section outlining allowed actions (monetized videos/streaming, inclusion in free CurseForge/Modrinth modpacks) and prohibited actions (commercial sales, paid Patreon redistributions, raw rehosting on ad-supported download hubs).

🎮 Version Compatibility Expansion

• Minecraft 26.1.2 Support Verified — Tested and verified to work flawlessly on the latest Minecraft Java hotfix 26.1.2 with Iris + Sodium.
• Minecraft 1.16.5 Support Verified — Tested and confirmed to run beautifully on the legendary modding version 1.16.5 (Iris/OptiFine).

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✨ Features At A Glance

☁️ 1. Meteorological 3D Volumetric Clouds (Fly-Through!)

AuraLite features a fully physical, flyable 3D cloud system driven by 12-step Raymarching in world coordinates:

• True 3D Space: Clouds float at a physical height (configurable base altitude). You can fly up, enter a dense, foggy overcast, and rise above the clouds to see an endless rolling sea of fluffy cumulus clouds.
• Camera-Inside-Cloud Veil (v0.2.5): When flying inside the cloud layer, a soft volumetric white/grey fog surrounds the camera.
• Independent Wind-Shear Layers (v0.2.5): Each cloud layer (Cirrus, Altocumulus, Altostratus, Cumulus) moves on its own rotated/sheared domain with the WIND_SPEED setting.
• Cloud Render Distance (v0.2.5): New 4-step control (Near / Standard / Far / Very Far) — from 3 000 m to 16 000 m horizon-scale decks.
• Beer's Law Self-Shadowing: Realistic light absorption makes cloud bottoms dense and dark while cloud tops glow with brilliant white/gold illumination.
• Mie Scattering (Silver Lining): Looking towards the sun produces a glowing golden halo around the cloud edges.
• Overcast Storms: When raining (/weather rain), the fluffy cumulus clouds automatically expand, darken, and merge into an ominous, heavy Nimbostratus/Cumulonimbus storm deck.

🌠 2. Living Night Sky (since v0.2.0)

The night sky is no longer just a static starfield — it's a fully procedural cosmos:

• Aurora Borealis: Realistic, flowing northern lights that ripple across the upper sky. Modes: Disabled / Only in Cold Biomes / Always Enabled, with independent speed and brightness controls. (v0.2.5: rendered in gbuffers_skybasic for reliability; cold-biome detection uses real biome uniforms. v1.0.7: tone softened and high-frequency noise removed — read as a photographic glow rather than oversaturated neon.)
• Milky Way Nebula: A subtle diagonal brownish galactic band glows softly above the horizon, with adjustable brightness.
• Procedural Stars: Independent brightness and density sliders let you choose between a few crisp pinpricks or a brilliantly dense Hubble-style sky. Stars sparkle and twinkle in real time.
• Physically-Based Meteors / Falling Stars (v1.0.0): configurable meteor activity, brightness, moon washout, and persistent ionization trails bring realistic night-sky streaks to the Overworld and the End.
• Persistent Rainbow: After rain stops, a soft rainbow arcs across the sky and gently fades out as the wetness uniform decays. Brightness and saturation are configurable.

☀️ 3. Analytical Kelvin Sun & Moon — Enhanced in v0.2.2, refined in v0.2.5

• Tanner Helland Blackbody Sun: Sunlight color temperature is dynamically calculated in real time based on the sun's elevation angle using a physically-correct blackbody Kelvin curve (selectable: Cool / Realistic / Warm Golden). This yields photoreal sunrise/sunset colors (~1800K–2200K), warm golden hours (~2800K), and clean crisp white noon light (~5700K–5800K).
• Beer-Lambert Atmospheric Extinction: Sunlight intensity dynamically drops as the sun approaches the horizon due to scattering in thick atmospheric masses: $airMass = \frac{1}{\sin(\alpha) + 0.15 \cdot (\alpha_{deg} + 3.885)^{-1.253}}$ This yields incredibly soft, rich, and breathtaking sunset and sunrise golden hour transitions!
• Independent Sun & Moon Intensity (v0.2.2): 4-step master sliders let you push the day brighter (Blazing) or sink nights into total darkness (Pitch Night).
• Moon Color Temperature (v0.2.2): choose between Icy Blue (cold), Silver (physically accurate 4100K), or Warm Cream (harvest-moon).
• Sun Halo (Mie forward-scatter) & Enhanced Sunrise/Sunset Glow (v0.2.2) — warm scattering effects on terrain when looking near the low sun.
• 🆕 Extended Twilight Window (v0.2.5): Sunset/sunrise lighting stays warm/red at /time set 12800 instead of snapping to neutral.
• Crispy Circular Sun & Moon Disks: Custom procedural, perfectly round, anti-aliased sun and moon disks are drawn onto the sky dome with glowing coronas and soft halo scattering.

👥 4. Soft Shadows, Immersive Dark Nights & Cozy Lights — Enhanced in v0.2.2, refined in v0.2.5

• Rotated Poisson Disk Soft Shadows (v0.2.2): replaces the old fixed 3×3 PCF kernel. Three quality steps — Sharp / Soft / Ultra Soft — give natural-looking penumbra on shadow maps up to 4096×4096.
• 🆕 Shadow Slope Bias Fix (v0.2.5): bias now uses raw NdotL to prevent acne artifacts.
• Shadow Distance Control (v0.2.2): cap dynamic shadow rendering at 60m / 80m / 120m / 160m for performance or quality tuning.
• Shadow Tint (v0.2.2): realistic cool-blue tint for daytime shadows under an open sky (or neutral / warm if you prefer).
• Ambient Lift (v0.2.2): control how dark shadowed areas appear at night and in caves.
• Light Wrap (Terminator Softness) (v0.2.2): choose physical Lambert, a soft photographic wrap, or a stylized look. (v0.2.5: all profiles default to realistic Lambert.)
• 🆕 SSAO / SAO Contact Ambient Occlusion (v0.2.5): screen-space darkening in corners and at geometry intersections. Enabled on ULTRA+ profiles.
• Deep Dark Nights (2× darker): Night ambient light, moonlight intensity, and fog are reduced by 2× by default to create incredibly atmospheric, immersive nights. Caves and forests are pitch dark, requiring torches for exploration (combine with the new Pitch Night moon preset for extra spice).
• Warm Block Lights: Torches, lanterns, and lava emit a cozy golden-amber glow with physically accurate quadratic falloff.
• 🕯️ Cozy Torch Flickering (since v0.2.0): Real-time flickering animations for torches, campfires, and lanterns add a living, warm atmosphere to your shelters. Held-item light contribution (heldBlockLightValue) is also accounted for.

🌊 5. Physical Fresnel Water & Silver Moonlight Path — Refined in v0.2.5

• Fresnel Effect: Water reflectivity is mathematically calculated based on your viewing angle. Looking straight down provides crystal transparency, while looking towards the horizon transitions water into a highly reflective, glossy sheet reflecting the sky dome.
• Silver Moonlight Path: Moonlight specular reflection on water ripples has been increased by 4.5×. At midnight, a brilliant silver lunar reflection path shimmers across the waving ocean.
• 🆕 Unified GGX PBR Water Specular (v0.2.5): Water's old Blinn-Phong specular replaced by composite's GGX microfacet model with proper Fresnel — physically consistent with terrain PBR.
• 3D Geometric Waves: Vertex shader waves physically displace the water mesh in real-time, and react to rainStrength / thunderStrength for choppier seas during storms.
• Independent Ripple & Specular Controls (since v0.2.0): WATER_RIFFLES (Calm / Standard / Choppy) and WATER_SPECULAR_STRENGTH (Soft / Standard / Glinting) can be tuned separately for the perfect water mood.
• Zero Feedback Glitches: Designed to be extremely stable, utilizing no feedback-loop depth buffer reads to guarantee bug-free solid rendering on all GPUs.

🌧️ 6. Dynamic Weather Surfaces (since v0.2.0)

• Wet Reflections: During rain, solid blocks like grass, dirt, and stone darken and become glossy, picking up sky reflections under open weather. Disables itself under roofs.
• Low Ground Mist (Y ≈ 60–70) (refined in v0.2.5): Soft fog sheets drift across water and ice surfaces at dawn and dusk. Uses large slow sheets + small breakup noise with optical distance accumulation for natural-looking radiation fog. Humidity from rain/wetness makes the mist persist longer.
• Camera-Inside-Mist Veil (v0.2.5): Standing inside the mist layer produces a subtle whole-view forward-scattering veil.
• Thunderstorm Awareness: Shaders distinguish between regular rain and full thunderstorms via the thunderStrength uniform, intensifying cloud darkness and wave chop accordingly.

🌿 7. Lively Foliage

• Waving animations for oak/spruce/birch leaves, tall grass, flowers, vines, lily pads, and crops.
• Gently animated using hardware-optimized sine waves and time constants.
• 🧊 Ice fix (since v0.2.0, refined in v1.0.4): regular ice renders with texture + semi-transparency; packed/blue ice renders opaque with texture. All ice types have waving and refraction disabled to eliminate visual glitches.
• 🪟 Glass rendering (v1.0.4): all glass blocks and panes (including every stained-glass variant and tinted glass) now render with their actual texture and proper transparency via the dedicated translucent terrain pass.

💎 8. Full LabPBR 1.3 Material Support + POM — PBR refined in v0.2.5

• 3D Normal Maps: Real-time TBN (Tangent-Binormal-Normal) matrices generate true three-dimensional depth on blocks (stone crevices, brick joints) reacting dynamically to light angles.
• Specular Reflection (GGX Microfacet): Polished surfaces give sharp glossy glints, while metallic surfaces (gold, copper, iron) tint the specular reflection with the block's native albedo. (v0.2.5: correct NdotL cosine factor added for Cook-Torrance BRDF accuracy.)
• 🧱 Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM) (since v0.2.0): True per-pixel block relief that pops out of the surface. Configurable POM_DEPTH (1–3) and POM_STEPS (1–4). Disabled in all profiles by default for stability; can be enabled manually. Recommended to keep off on incompatible resource packs.
• Seamless Fallback: Falls back automatically to gorgeous flat vanilla textures if no PBR resource pack is active.

🌀 9. Cosmic Nether Portal (since v0.2.0, improved in v0.2.5)

The vanilla Nether portal texture is procedurally transformed into a swirling 3D plasma vortex — animated purple/magenta cosmic energy that pulses with hypnotic depth. Mapped via dedicated block ID 10006 in block.properties. (v0.2.5: portal pixels are flagged as emissive so composite skips scene lighting and displays the plasma as-is.)

🪟 10. Translucent Block Rendering (added in v1.0.4, unchanged in v1.0.6)

AuraLite renders translucent blocks with proper per-block transparency through a dedicated gbuffers_terrain_translucent pass, ensuring correct display on both Iris and Oculus pipelines:

• Regular ice — semi-transparent with actual texture; opacity scales with WATER_TRANSPARENCY (Clear / Balanced / Deep).
• Packed ice / blue ice / frosted ice — opaque with texture, visually distinct from regular ice.
• All glass blocks and panes — every vanilla glass type (clear, all 16 stained variants, pane variants, tinted glass) renders with its actual texture and correct transparency. No more invisible glass against bright skies.

🎬 11. Cinematic Post-Processing — Refined in v1.0.1, v1.0.3

• Multiple Tone Mapping Curves (since v0.2.0): Pick from Soft, Filmic (ACES), or Intense (High Contrast) to match your preferred mood.
• Color Vibrancy (since v0.2.0): 4-step non-linear saturation control (Muted / Balanced / Colorful / Vivid) that makes foliage glow emerald and skies look lush, without crushing skin tones.
• Exposure Brightness: Muted / Balanced / Vibrant — global brightness lift.
• Subtle Vignette: Gentle lens-darkening at screen edges for improved depth and immersion.

🔥 12. Procedural Lava & Heat Shimmer (v1.0.6)

• Procedural Magma Surface: Lava and flowing-lava blocks are rendered with a procedural Voronoi crack field, animated convection flow, rare hot spots, and rising bubbles.
• 3D Parallax Cracks: A 4-step parallax occlusion raymarch gives real depth between the dark basalt crust and glowing magma.
• Viscous Vertex Waves: The top face slowly swells with a heavier, slower wave than water, giving a molten feel.
• Heat Shimmer: final.fsh applies a subtle screen-space distortion above lava pixels to simulate rising hot air.
• PBR-Ready: Rough basalt crust (0.95) and glossy magma cracks (0.02) produce physically plausible highlights.

🛡️ 13. Realistic Atmospheric Fog (v0.2.5)

• Fog density now accounts for altitude (aerosol concentration decays with height), horizon path length, and indoor/outdoor exposure via skylight.
• Consistent Beer-Lambert distance fog with height-weighted density — no delayed fog walls.

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☁️ Cloud Altitude Classification

AuraLite's sky is meteorologically modeled after the international cloud classification system:

Altitude (m)
16 000 ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─  ↑ Cumulonimbus (Cb)
12 000 ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─│
10 000   Ci  ─ Cirrus              │ Vertical
 8 000   Cc  ─ Cirrocumulus         │ Development
 6 000 ─ ─ Cs ─ Cirrostratus ─ ─ ─ ─│─ High Clouds (Cirrus layer)
 5 000   Ac  ─ Altocumulus          │
 4 000   As  ─ Altostratus          │
 2 000 ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─│─ Mid Clouds
 1 500   Sc  ─ Stratocumulus        │
 1 000   St  ─ Stratus              │
 500     Ns  ─ Nimbostratus         │─ Low Clouds (Cumulus layer)
   0 ─ ─ Cu ─ Cumulus ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─│

AuraLite smoothly transitions these layers based on in-game weather conditions (clearing, rain, or storms).

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⚙️ Performance Optimizations (OpenGL 4.6 Native)

AuraLite is built from the ground up for maximum FPS using OpenGL 4.6 native hardware operations:

• Multiply-Add Friendly Math: Wave and waving-foliage math is written as simple multiply-add expressions so modern drivers can optimize it efficiently, while avoiding the explicit fma() intrinsic that caused compilation issues on some GPUs / Mesa drivers.
• Bitwise Noise Generation: Replacing slow transcendental float functions (fract(sin(dot(...)))) with ultra-fast Integer Bitwise PCG-style hashes utilizing floatBitsToUint and uintBitsToFloat.
• Early-Ray Termination: Volumetric raymarching terminates instantly once cloud transmittance falls below 2%, saving rendering power.
• No Hand Transparency Glitches: Handheld items, particles, and mobs are rendered in a separate stable path without tangent matrix overhead, eliminating "translucent hand" bugs.
• Dead Code Elimination (v0.2.3–v0.2.5): Removed unused noise/fbm functions, dead cloud raymarching code from gbuffers_skybasic, and redundant render calls to reduce GPU compilation time.
• Profile-Based Scaling: Every feature (POM, Auroras, SSAO, Cozy Lights, Wet Reflections, Ground Mist, Shadow Distance, Cloud Distance, Sun Halo, etc.) is intelligently distributed across the LOW / MED / HIGH / ULTRA / EXTREME profiles so low-end systems don't pay for effects they can't afford.

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🎛️ In-Game Configuration Options

AuraLite includes localized in-game configuration files for 69 language codes, including major European, Asian, American regional variants and compatibility aliases such as fil_ph / tl_ph.

⚠️ Some localization strings may be inaccurate. If something looks strange, compare with the English original.

[Lighting Settings]

• Dynamic Shadows — Toggle sun/moon shadows.
• Shadow Resolution — 512 / 1024 / 2048 / 4096 / 8192 — real Iris shadowMapResolution const (8192 for EXTREME).
• Shadow Softness (v0.2.2) — Sharp / Soft / Ultra Soft — rotated Poisson disk filtering.
• Shadow Distance (v0.2.2, extended in v1.1.2, rebalanced in v1.1.4) — Near (60m) / Standard (80-120m) / DH Seam (192m) / Far (256m) / DH Extended (512m) / DH Far (768m) — fades with SHADOW_LOD; 192/512/768 m give Distant Horizons a useful shadow-map footprint.
• Shadow LOD (v1.1.2) — Off / Balanced / Aggressive — reduces samples (32→16→8→4) and expands filter radius at distance.
• 🆕 Distant Horizons Shadow Range (DH_SHADOW_RANGE) (v1.1.4) — Seam (1.25×) / Extended (2×) / Far (4×) of vanilla far. No effect without Distant Horizons. The DH-specific shadow pass is off by default (dhShadow.enabled=false) to protect vanilla terrain shadows on Iris 1.7.6 + DH 3.2.
• Shadow PCSS Blur (v1.1.2) — Disabled (fixed softness) / Enabled (distance/rain-based penumbra).
• Shadow Tint (v0.2.2) — Neutral Gray / Cool Blue (Realistic) / Warm.
• Shadow Lift / Ambient (v0.2.2) — Dark / Standard / Lifted (Bright).
• Light Wrap (Terminator) (v0.2.2) — Realistic (Lambert) / Soft / Stylized.
• Torch Warmth — Cozy / Warm / Intense — Customize block light warmth.
• Torch Flickering (COZY_LIGHTS) — Real-time flicker animations for torches, campfires, and lanterns.
• PBR Lighting — Toggle PBR specular reflections and normal mapping.
• 3D Block Relief (POM) — Enable Parallax Occlusion Mapping for true 3D block textures (LabPBR resource pack required).
• PBR Intensity — Subtle / Standard / Mirror
• 🆕 SSAO / SAO Occlusion (v0.2.5) — Screen-space ambient occlusion for contact shadows in corners, under blocks, and around geometry intersections.
• 🆕 SSAO Strength (v0.2.5) — Subtle / Balanced / Deep.
• 🆕 Screen-Space Reflections (SSR) (v0.2.9) — loader-agnostic screen-space reflections for water and wet glossy surfaces.
• 🆕 SSR Quality (v0.2.9) — Fast / Balanced / High raymarch step budget.
• 🆕 SSR Strength (v0.2.9) — Soft / Balanced / Mirror reflection intensity.
• 🆕 PBR Render Distance (PBR_DISTANCE) (v1.0.3) — Near (16m) / Standard (48m) / Far (128m) / Unlimited — maximum distance for PBR specular calculations. Saves GPU on far terrain.

[Sun & Moon] (since v0.2.2)

• Sun Intensity — Dim / Standard / Bright / Blazing
• Sun Colour Temperature — Cool / Neutral · Realistic (Tanner Helland) · Warm Golden
• Sun Halo (Mie Scatter) — toggle the warm forward-scatter glow when looking near the sun.
• Enhanced Sunrise/Sunset Glow — toggle stronger warm back-scatter at low sun angles.
• Moon Intensity — Pitch Night / Standard / Bright Moon / Full Night
• Moon Colour Temperature — Icy Blue / Silver (Realistic 4100K) / Warm Cream

[Foliage Settings]

• Waving Leaves — Toggle leaves animation.
• Waving Foliage — Toggle grass, flowers, and crops animation.
• Wind Speed — Gentle / Breeze / Gale
• 🆕 Foliage SSS (FOLIAGE_SSS) (v1.0.3) — Subsurface scattering / translucency for leaves and plants (light bleeding when looking toward the sun).

[Water Settings]

• Water Waves — Toggle 3D vertex water waves.
• Water Density — Clear / Balanced / Deep — Adjust water transparency.
• Water Ripple Strength (WATER_RIFFLES) — Calm / Standard / Choppy — Fine normal-map ripples.
• Water Specular Glow (WATER_SPECULAR_STRENGTH) — Soft / Standard / Glinting — Brightness of sun/moon highlights on the ripples.
• 🆕 Water Wave Scale (WATER_WAVE_SCALE) (v0.2.9, spectrum rebuilt in v1.1.4) — Calm / Standard / Choppy / Stormy — Gerstner swell amplitude used by SSR/refraction.
• 🆕 Water Wave Detail (WATER_WAVE_DETAIL) (v0.2.9, spectrum rebuilt in v1.1.4) — Coarse / Standard / Dense — Gerstner wavelength/capillary density.
• 🆕 Underwater Night Darkness (v0.2.9) — Moonlit Pool / Dim / True Night / Pitch Dark — controls how dark underwater scenes become at night.
• 🆕 Water Diagnostics (WATER_DEBUG) (v1.1.3) — developer overlay (Off / Classify / Lightmap / Raw tag alpha) for diagnosing water classification on Iris builds that drop translucent MRT writes. Keep Off in normal play.

[Sky & Clouds]

• Volumetric 3D Clouds — Toggle raymarched clouds.
• Cloud Altitude — Low (~110m) / Standard (~160m) / High (~240m)
• Cloud Thickness — Thin (Cirrus) / Standard (Cumulus) / Dense (Stormy)
• 🆕 Cloud Render Distance (v0.2.5) — Near / Standard / Far / Very Far — Maximum draw distance for volumetric clouds.
• 🆕 Cloud Quality (CLOUD_QUALITY) (v1.1.3) — Cheap (8 steps) / Standard (12 steps) / High (16 steps) — raymarch step budget for volumetric clouds.
• 🆕 Cloud Shadows (v0.2.7) — transparent procedural shadows from cloud density.
• 🆕 Cloud Shadow Strength (v0.2.7) — Soft / Balanced / Dramatic.
• 🆕 Godrays / Sun Shafts (v0.2.7) — physically-inspired volumetric single-scattering light shafts.
• 🆕 Godrays Quality (v0.2.7) — Fast / Balanced / High.
• Aurora Borealis — Disabled / Only in Cold Biomes / Always Enabled
• Aurora Speed — Slow / Standard / Fast
• Aurora Brightness — Soft / Standard / Glowing
• Milky Way Brightness — Dim / Standard / Bright
• Stars Brightness — Faint / Standard / Brilliant
• Stars Density — Few / Standard / Dense
• 🆕 Meteors (Falling Stars) (v1.0.0) — Physically-based meteor streaks across the night sky.
• 🆕 Meteor Activity (ZHR) (v1.0.0) — Sporadic (~10/hr) / Active Shower / Meteor Storm.
• 🆕 Meteor Brightness (v1.0.0) — Faint (Realistic) / Standard / Bright Fireballs.
• Rainbow Intensity — Subtle / Balanced / Vivid — Post-rain rainbow arc.

[Post-Processing & Fog]

• Fog Density — Low / Medium / High — Atmospheric horizon mist.
• Low Ground Mist (GROUND_MIST) — Realistic dawn/evening radiation fog at Y ≈ 60–70.
• Exposure Brightness — Muted / Balanced / Vibrant
• Color Vibrancy (COLOR_SATURATION) — Muted / Balanced / Colorful / Vivid
• Image Contrast (CONTRAST) — Soft / Filmic (ACES) / Intense (High Contrast) / Photographic (AgX-like) — Choose the tone mapping curve.
• 🆕 HDR Bloom (BLOOM / HDR_BLOOM) (v1.0.1, pyramid in v1.1.3, half-res + skippable in v1.1.4) — gaussian-pyramid bloom (composite3–7): threshold brightpass + tight & wide separable gaussian octaves. v1.1.4 runs the chain at half resolution(v1.0.1, pyramid in v1.1.3, half-res + skippable in v1.1.4)_ — gaussian-pyramid bloom (composite3–7): threshold brightpass + tight & wide separable gaussian octaves. v1.1.4 runs the chain at half resolution and skips the five passes entirely when Bloom is off (VERY_LOW/LOW). Strength: Subtle / Balanced / Strong.
• 🆕 Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) (v0.2.7, completed in v1.1.3, DH/sky/reactive in v1.1.4) — Halton sub-pixel camera jitter + motion reprojection + YCoCg variance clipping. On by default in HIGH/ULTRA/EXTREME since v1.1.3, off on lighter profiles. v1.1.4 adds DH-correct reprojection, a material reactive mask (water/foliage/emissive) and optional sky temporal resolve.
• 🆕 TAA Strength (v0.2.7) — Light / Balanced / Stable — presets the variance-clip tightness (1.50 / 1.25 / 1.10 γ).
• 🆕 TAA Camera Jitter (TAA_JITTER) (v1.1.3) — Off / Subtle / Standard / Strong — sub-pixel Halton camera jitter amplitude (±0.25 / ±0.5 / ±0.75 px) for full sub-pixel reconstruction. Off by default for a steady image; enable it to eliminate high-frequency shimmer. Requires TAA.
• 🆕 Post-Sharpen (POST_SHARPEN) (v1.1.3) — gentle unsharp mask that recovers texture detail softened by TAA history blending (on in MED+ profiles).
• 🆕 Spatial Anti-Aliasing (SPATIAL_AA_MODE) (v1.0.3) — Off / FXAA / SMAA — post-process edge smoothing. FXAA uses Sobel gradient-directed blending; SMAA adds depth discontinuity detection for geometry edges. Freely combinable with TAA.
• Vignette — Toggle cinematic corner darkening.
• (Hidden) Rain Wetness Reflections (WET_REFLECTIONS) — Wet glossy ground during rain (enabled by default in MED+ profiles).

[Experimental] (since v1.1.0, expanded in v1.1.4)

• Sky Mode (SKY_MODE) — Gradient (Legacy) / Physical (Realtime). Off in every shipped profile.
• Sky Style (SKY_STYLE) — Realistic / Semi-realistic / Fantasy.
• Sky Quality (SKY_QUALITY) — Fast / Standard / High primary raymarch samples.
• 🆕 Atmospheric Turbidity (v1.1.4) — Crisp / Balanced / Hazy.
• 🆕 Atmosphere Scale (v1.1.4) — Compact (25 m/block) / Balanced (50 m) / Cinematic (100 m).
• 🆕 Ground Bounce Albedo (v1.1.4) — Auto / Neutral Soil / Vegetation / Snow / Desert.
• 🆕 Sky Temporal Resolve (SKY_TEMPORAL) (v1.1.4) — rotation-only TAA for the sky (on in HIGH+). Requires TAA.

🎚️ Quality Profiles (rebalanced in v1.1.4 — shadows 60–768 m with LOD + DH range; TAA on in HIGH+ since v1.1.3, camera jitter off by default everywhere)

Profile	Target	Shadows	Clouds	Cloud Shadows	Godrays	TAA	SSR	PBR	PBR Dist	AA	SSAO	Heat Shimmer	Heavy Extras
VERY_LOW	Maximum FPS	❌ 512/60m	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	16m	Off	❌	❌	Most extras off, bloom off
LOW	Weak GPUs	❌ 512/60m	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	16m	FXAA	❌	❌	Water/foliage motion, stars, vignette
MED	Balanced	✅ 1024/192m	✅ Std	✅ Soft	✅ Fast	❌	✅ F	✅	48m	FXAA	❌	✅ Subtle	Wet refl + ground mist + SSS + bloom
HIGH	High quality	✅ 2048/512m	✅ Far	✅ Balanced	✅ Bal	✅	✅ B	✅	128m	SMAA	✅ Subtle	✅ Balanced	Full atmosphere + SSR + TAA
ULTRA	Very high	✅ 4096/512m Aggr LOD	✅ VFar	✅ Balanced	✅ High	✅	✅ H	✅	128m	SMAA	✅ Balanced	✅ Balanced	High-end visuals + TAA
EXTREME	Max quality	✅ 8192/768m Aggr LOD	✅ Dense	✅ Dramatic	✅ High	✅	✅ H	✅	∞	SMAA	✅ Deep	✅ Strong	Heaviest cinematic + TAA

💫 Shooting stars are disabled on VERY_LOW / LOW and enabled from MED upward. 🌿 Foliage SSS is enabled from MED upward (disabled on VERY_LOW/LOW for maximum FPS). 🔥 Heat shimmer is disabled on VERY_LOW / LOW and enabled from MED upward. ✨ HDR bloom is skipped entirely on VERY_LOW / LOW (since v1.1.4). 🎯 TAA is on by default in HIGH / ULTRA / EXTREME and off on lighter profiles (since v1.1.3). The camera jitter is off by default everywhere — enable TAA_JITTER (Off/Subtle/Standard/Strong) in [Post-Processing & Fog] for full sub-pixel reconstruction; TAA_STRENGTH presets the variance-clip tightness. SKY_TEMPORAL is on in HIGH+ (v1.1.4). 🗺️ Distant Horizons: experimental, partial DH support (introduced in v1.1.2). v1.1.4 replaces the v1.1.3 screen-door seam with a hard far hand-off, adds DH TAA jitter/reprojection, a dedicated illuminated material tag (0.24), and DH_SHADOW_RANGE. The DH-specific shadow pass is off by default to protect vanilla terrain shadows on Iris 1.7.6 + DH 3.2. Still WIP, not full compatibility.

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📄 License & Compatibility

• AuraLite is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
• Copyright (c) 2026 AlexanderNyr.
• Officially Supported Platform: Minecraft 1.16.5 – 26.2 with Sodium + Iris or OptiFine loader.
• Note: Verified to work flawlessly on Minecraft 1.16.5, 1.20.1, 1.21.1, and 26.1.2.
• Distant Horizons: v1.1.3 continues experimental, partial DH support (WIP, introduced in v1.1.2) — dh_terrain, dh_water, dh_shadow minimal passes to prevent Iris from hiding LOD chunks, now with a soft screen-door seam at the vanilla↔DH boundary. Provides fog rescaling, depth reconciliation, overdraw culling, emissive/heat-shimmer for distant lava. Still NOT full support: no LabPBR maps for DH, hardcoded full skylight, no POM — full compatibility will be announced separately when ready.

⚖️ Rules & Permissions (FAQ)

• Videos & Streams: You are free to showcase, stream, and use this shader in your videos (including monetized channels on YouTube, Twitch, etc.).
• Modpacks: You are free to include this shader in your free modpacks on CurseForge, Modrinth, or other platforms.
• Personal Tweaks: You can modify the shader code for personal use.
• No Re-hosting: Do not upload the raw shader files to third-party sites (especially behind ad links like AdFly). Always use and link to our official, authorized sources below.
• Derivative Works: If you modify this shader and distribute it, your version must be free, open-source, and licensed under the exact same CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license with clear attribution to the original author.

🌐 Official & Authorized Sources:

• GitHub: https://github.com/AlexanderNyr/AuraLite-Shaders
• Modrinth: https://modrinth.com/shader/auralite-shaders
• CurseForge: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/shaders/auralite-shaders