Compatibility
Minecraft: Java Edition
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Details
NeoLux
Warm, low sunlight against quiet shade, soft volumetric clouds and dark water that mirrors the shore. A deferred shaderpack for Iris that goes for a calm, cinematic look rather than a long list of effects.
What makes a shaderpack look good is mostly the light, not the effect list. NeoLux runs the overworld on a palette of its own that follows the height of the sun. At noon the dome is a deep blue over a pale horizon. Towards evening the light turns warm and low, spreads out around the sun, and the rest of the sky goes grey and still.
The sun is strong and the shade is weak, and the shade loses part of its color. A sunlit wall and its shaded side read as two different things instead of the same surface in a bluer tint, and a field of flowers keeps its color where the sun actually hits it.
The vanilla sky colors cannot carry that. The fog color Minecraft reports even turns with the direction the camera faces, so the whole sky changes tint whenever you turn around. The Nether and the End keep the vanilla driven colors, since a sun palette means nothing there.
Installation
- Install Iris.
- Drop the NeoLux zip into
.minecraft/shaderpacks/. - In game: Options -> Video Settings -> Shader Packs -> NeoLux.
No resource pack, no mod, no config file to edit. Everything is in the shader options screen.
What is in it
| Area | Implementation |
|---|---|
| Light | Sun and sky light follow the height of the sun, warm at golden hour, block faces shaded by orientation |
| Sky | Deep blue dome, pale horizon, warm scattering around a low sun, procedural stars |
| Clouds | Procedural volumetric layer lit towards the sun, bright at the rim and darker in the core, mirrored by water |
| Shadows | Distorted shadow map, hardware filtered samples on a rotated ring, tinted by stained glass and water |
| Plants | Lit like the ground they grow out of, light wraps around them and shines through against the sun, wind moves them |
| Water | Dark and mirroring, screen space reflections with sky and clouds behind them, ripples, refraction, caustics |
| Ambient occlusion | Screen space, golden angle sampling, 4 to 24 taps |
| Light shafts | Volumetric light marched through the shadow map, 6 to 40 steps |
| Fog | Aerial haze that barely touches the first hundred blocks on a clear day, thicker at night and in rain |
| Weather | Rain darkens open ground and gives it a sun glint and a mirrored sky |
| Post | Soft glow bloom, five tonemap curves, lens flare, grading, vignette, grain |
Quality profiles
The profile button sits at the top of the options screen. Six steps, from a machine that should not be running shaders at all to one that has cycles to burn.
| Profile | Shadow map | Filter | AO taps | Light shafts | Reflection steps | Wave octaves | Cloud steps |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Potato | off | - | off | off | off | off | 4 |
| Low | 1024 / 96 blocks | 1 | 4 | off | off | 1 | 6 |
| Medium | 2048 / 128 blocks | 2 | 8 | 10 | 16 | 2 | 8 |
| High | 2048 / 160 blocks | 2 | 12 | 14 | 22 | 3 | 10 |
| Ultra | 3072 / 224 blocks | 3 | 16 | 20 | 30 | 4 | 14 |
| Extreme | 4096 / 320 blocks | 4 | 24 | 40 | 56 | 4 | 20 |
Each profile writes the complete set of performance relevant options, not just the ones it changes. Switching from Extreme down to Low leaves nothing expensive behind, which is the usual way profile buttons quietly lie to you.
Color, fog and exposure are deliberately left out of the profiles. Those are taste, not performance, and a profile switch should not undo an evening of grading.
Options
81 of them, across nine pages, in English and German.
Shadows: resolution, distance, filter rings, softness, bias, tint strength, sun path rotation.
Lighting: sunlight, ambient, block light and night brightness scale separately, so you can have dark nights without dark caves. Plus torch warmth, minimum ambient, sky light falloff, how much color the shade loses, occlusion strength, radius and sample count, and light shaft strength and quality.
Sky: brightness, sun and moon brightness, the glow around the sun, and stars with their own brightness and density.
Clouds: NeoLux, vanilla or none. Cover, height, thickness, quality, speed, brightness, and whether water reflects them.
Fog: density, an onset distance that keeps the near field clear, haze strength and height, and underwater visibility.
Water: reflection range and sharpness as separate controls, refraction, blur and caustics, wave height and detail, opacity, absorption, and the sun glint.
World and geometry: waving plants and leaves, wind speed, wet surfaces in rain, alpha cutout, and the width and strength of the block selection outline.
Post processing: five tonemap curves (none, ACES, Reinhard, Uncharted 2, Soft), exposure, bloom with strength, threshold, radius and level count, sharpening, vignette, and lens flare.
Color and style: saturation, vibrance, contrast, color temperature, film grain, chromatic aberration.
Requirements
- Iris on Minecraft 1.17 or newer. Developed and tested on Minecraft 26.3 with Iris 1.11.
- A GPU that can do GLSL 1.20 with framebuffer objects, which in practice means anything from the last decade.
OptiFine is no longer supported from 1.1.0 on. The sky and the light tell the overworld apart from the other dimensions through a uniform only Iris provides, and without it everything falls back to the vanilla colors.
1.17 is the floor because the block selection outline is drawn as widened line quads, a technique that only exists from that version on.
A note on the source
The shader is plain GLSL 1.20 with no external includes and no textures of its own: the clouds and the water surface are procedural. If you want to read how something works, the passes are named after what they do and the buffer layout is documented at the top of lib/common.glsl. The source is on Codeberg.
Licensed GPL-3.0. Fork it, take the parts you like, keep it open.