# Aetherstone

Aetherstone

About

Aetherstone is a stylized RPG shader pack for Minecraft Java Edition, built around one hard constraint: staying comfortably playable on integrated graphics without giving up a painted, illustrated look. It started as a solo project to make Minecraft look good on an AMD Radeon 860M — an integrated GPU well below a discrete laptop card, let alone a desktop one — and every part of the pack, from the toon shading to the temporal upscaler, is built around holding that line. I am currently on internal revision r25 with it and it is still under active development.

Aetherstone is not trying to be photorealistic. Cel-shaded lighting, an (optional)ink outline, a warm terminator band and cool-tinted shadows give it a hand-painted feel closer to a stylized RPG than a simulation — while still running real dynamic shadows, real water physics, and real procedural sky.

Features

• Toon shading with adjustable light bands, a hand-tunable ink outlineand cool-tinted shadows — the painted-edge look the pack is built around.
• Stylized water: layered waves, a directional sun glint, environment-map and cloud reflections, and real depth-based colour fade. Submerged, the water surface is rendered as a proper refractive ceiling with physically modeled Snell's window, its own ripple detail, and a visible sun and moon through the window rather than a flat texture.
• Caustics from a genuine moving light network on submerged surfaces, not a scrolling texture.
• Procedural, self-shadowing clouds in two layers, with their own edge detail and independent speed and coverage.
• Post processing Light shafts, analytic sun bloom, and lens flare toward the sun,
• Temporal Upscaling for an FPS boost,
• camera-rotation motion blur that leaves the held itemand your movement untouched, and
• a vignette.
• Metal reflections — a sky reflection and tight specular highlight on iron, copper, gold and netherite blocks specifically.
• Cave Brightness, a playability setting that lifts unlit interiors just enough to explore by eye, without touching a moonlit field above ground.
• Optional LabPBR resource pack support for normal, specular and metalness maps, if you run one.
• Mod Support currently for Distant Horizons and Physics mod Ocean phsics, Voxy is planned.

Profiles

Five profiles, Potato through Max, each fully specified rather than only listing what changed from the last — switching profiles is always a complete, predictable state change:

• 🥔 Potato — the bare essentials only, for the lowest-end hardware.
• ⚖️ Balanced — most effects on, sample counts and resolutions trimmed.
• ⭐ Recommended (default) — the intended high fps experience.
• 🎨 Pretty — higher fidelity when FPS headroom exists.
• 🚀 Max — every effect at full quality (not much difference to Pretty).

Actual FPS depends heavily on your hardware, resource pack, render distance (including Distant Horizon's) and scene complexity, so no fixed benchmark number would be honest here — start on Recommended and move up or down the list from there. A good way to find the performance and visuals that are good for you is also to not only change shader settings but also play around with real render distance and Distand Horizon's render distance. On weak hardware I recommend 6-12 real render distance with Distant Horizons turned off, or Distant Hoizons 32 render distance and chunk quality on low or medium paired with 4-6 real render distance.

Settings

The in-game settings screen has three parts: the profile picker, an Effects & Style page with the handful of settings most people actually want to touch (render scale, sharpening, outline, toon shading, colour grade, and on/off switches for the heavier effects, each with a plain-language description), and an Advanced Settings page with the full set of tuning options underneath, for anyone who wants to go further.

Mod support

• Distant Horizons — terrain and water render through the shader at LOD range, including the underwater ceiling past the normal render edge. DH's own shadow casting is intentionally not used; the shadow map stays independent of DH by design, after several attempts at combining them broke ordinary shadows. If you run DH alongside this pack, turn off DH's own cloud rendering in its settings (top-left icon in Video Settings) so it doesn't draw over this pack's clouds.

• 🖥️ Window Resizing / Resolution Bug Workaround

  Changing your window size, toggling fullscreen, or altering screen resolution while the shader is active can cause visual glitching. Workaround: Simply reload the shader pack. (You can do this by opening shader settings and toggling the pack off and back on, or by assigning a hotkey under Options → Controls → Key Binds → Iris (Reload Shaders).)

• [Physics Mod Pro](get on Physics Mod creators Patreon for free) (Ocean Physics) — full wave support for its ocean.

Installation

• First, install Iris (which brings in Sodium as a dependency) to be able to load shader packs.
• Launch the game and open Video Settings → Shader Packs.
• Click the button to open the shaderpacks folder.
• Download Aetherstone and place the zip file in that folder — do not unzip it.
• Back in the game, select Aetherstone from the shader packs menu (refresh the list if it doesn't appear).
• Start on the Recommended profile.

Aetherstone requires Iris, and relies on Iris-specific features (custom texture binding for its water and caustic maps), so it is not compatible with OptiFine.

Support

If you'd like to support future development: 👉 Ko-fi