Sylbobek's Shader Pack

A realistic, performance-friendly shader pack that turns Minecraft into a living, breathing world - soft shadows, a fully procedural sky, animated vegetation and stylish cinematic colors, all running smoothly even on mid-range PCs.

Sylbobek's Shader Pack is a complete lighting overhaul written from scratch in GLSL. It replaces Minecraft's flat vanilla lighting with a modern deferred rendering pipeline: real-time shadow mapping, HDR lighting with ACES tonemapping, atmospheric fog and full post-processing - while staying light enough to keep high FPS.

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☀️ Sky & Atmosphere

• Fully procedural sky - no static skybox textures. The sky color, sun and clouds are computed in real time.
• Golden sunrises and sunsets - the horizon glows orange, sunlight turns warm and shadows stretch with the sun angle.
• Dynamic clouds - procedural cloud layer that drifts with time and thickens when a storm is coming. During rain the whole sky turns overcast and gray.
• Night sky - twinkling stars and a moon with real moon phases synced to the in-game calendar.
• God rays (volumetric light shafts) - sunlight visibly breaks through tree leaves and cave openings; moonlight does the same at night.
• Atmospheric fog - distance fog tinted by the sky color, denser during rain and at night. The Nether gets its own warm, reddish fog.

🌑 Lighting & Shadows

• Real-time soft shadows - every block and entity casts a dynamic shadow with smooth, natural edges (PCF filtering on a Vogel disk, 4096px shadow map).
• Colored shadows - light passing through stained glass or water tints the shadow with its color.
• Warm torchlight - torches, lanterns and glowstone cast a cozy, warm-orange light with realistic falloff, clearly distinct from cool skylight.
• Emissive blocks glow - lava, glowstone, sea lanterns, froglights, campfires and more actually emit a visible glow (bloom).
• Hemispheric ambient light - surfaces facing the sky are brighter than ceilings and undersides, giving the world real depth instead of flat vanilla shading.

🌊 Water

• Animated procedural waves - the water surface constantly moves with layered wave noise.
• Sky reflections with Fresnel - water mirrors the sky at grazing angles and turns transparent when you look straight down, just like real water.
• Sun glitter - a bright specular streak dances on the waves at sunset.
• Underwater atmosphere - dense blue fog and light shafts when you dive.

🌿 Living Vegetation

Almost every plant in the game is animated with its own motion style:

Plant	Motion
Grass, flowers, crops	quick swaying in the wind (stronger during rain)
Tree leaves	gentle 3D rustling
Bamboo & sugar cane	whole stalks bend with a wave traveling up the stem
Vines on walls	slide along the wall surface and flutter outward
Kelp & seagrass	slow, wide swaying in underwater currents

🎬 Post-processing

• ACES filmic tonemapping - the same color response curve used in the movie industry; highlights roll off softly instead of clipping to white.
• 3 built-in color profiles - Realistic (muted, natural), Vivid (default, punchy colors) and Cinematic (teal & orange movie grade).
• Bloom - bright light sources bleed a soft glow into the scene.
• Subtle FXAA - smooths jagged edges without blurring block textures (can be toggled off).
• Vignette and adjustable contrast/saturation/exposure.

⚡ Performance

Designed to be FPS-friendly from the ground up:

• Adaptive shadow sampling - full 16-tap soft shadows are computed only at shadow edges; the rest of the screen uses a fast 5-tap path (~3× cheaper).
• Lightweight procedural sky instead of expensive volumetrics.
• Every heavy effect (shadows resolution, god rays, bloom, FXAA) can be tuned or disabled in Shader Options - the pack scales from potato to beast PC.

📥 Installation

1. Install OptiFine or Iris + Sodium (recommended for 1.21.x).
2. Download the ZIP and drop it into .minecraft/shaderpacks/.
3. In game: Options → Video Settings → Shaders → select Sylbobek's Shader Pack.
4. Tweak everything to your taste in Shader Options (sliders for exposure, saturation, fog, bloom, shadow softness, water waves and more).

Supported: Minecraft 1.21.x • OptiFine HD U J9+ • Iris 1.7+ Not required: no resource pack needed, works with vanilla textures.

🗺️ Roadmap

Coming in v2.0:

• Real-time screen-space reflections on water (terrain, buildings and torches mirrored in real time)
• Depth-based water clarity with refraction and animated caustics
• Wet ground that darkens and glistens after rain
• Held-item light (walk through caves with a torch in hand)
• Eye adaptation when moving between caves and daylight
• Shooting stars on clear nights

❓ FAQ

Q: My FPS dropped, what should I lower first? A: Set shadowMapResolution to 2048 (or 1024) in Shader Options - shadows are the heaviest effect.

Q: Does it work with the Nether and the End? A: Yes. Both dimensions use simplified lighting with dimension-tinted fog; a full custom sky for them is planned.

Q: The image is too soft/blurry for me. A: Turn off FXAA in Shader Options - the pack is fully playable without it.

Q: Iris or OptiFine? A: Both work. On 1.21.x we recommend Iris + Sodium for noticeably better performance.

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Made with ❤️ by Sylbobek. Feedback and screenshots welcome in the comments!