Ambiance RT

Realistic light, Minecraft resolution.

Ambiance RT is an experimental shaderpack project exploring a different way to light Minecraft: simulating believable light behavior while preserving the visual language of its textures.

The goal isn’t to turn Minecraft into a photorealistic game. It’s to give its blocks lighting that feels like part of their material: shadows, colored light bounces and reflections expressed at the same resolution as the game’s textures.

Lighting anchored to texels

A texel is a texture pixel. In Ambiance RT, it also becomes the unit at which lighting is resolved on surfaces.

The shader locates each texel on a block, calculates its lighting contributions through ray tracing and shares that result across the screen pixels displaying the same surface texel. Instead of smoothing the lighting between neighboring texels, it preserves their boundaries.

Light travels through the world, but takes shape on the texture grid.

This isn’t a pixelation filter applied to the final image, nor is the lighting painted into the texture files. Lighting remains dynamic, and reflections still respond to the camera’s viewpoint. Their appearance is anchored to the surfaces of blocks rather than to a screen-space pixel grid.

The intended result is an atmosphere that feels both familiar and unusual: a room lit by glowstone, colors bouncing between walls, metal reflecting its surroundings—all without erasing Minecraft’s pixelated structure.

Moving toward a fully Vulkan renderer

The target architecture is fully native Vulkan, from rasterization to hardware-accelerated ray tracing, with no OpenGL bridge.

The migration to this architecture is planned. It will replace the hybrid approach used by the early prototypes while preserving Ambiance RT’s central principle: calculating and displaying light at the texel level.

Development status

Ambiance RT is in early development. Rendering quality, stability and performance are still being worked on. Experimental builds may contain visual artifacts or incomplete features.

Supported Minecraft versions, dependencies and tested hardware configurations will be specified for each release. Compatibility with other rendering mods should not be assumed.