john's shaders
A lightweight, performance-first shader pack for Minecraft Java Edition. The goal is realistic lighting — soft shadows, reflective water, wet weather, moving foliage — while staying fast enough for mid-range hardware. Built for the OptiFine / Iris pipeline.
Add a screenshot or two here — the reflective-water sunset shot makes a strong lead image.
Features
Soft shadows — Percentage-Closer Filtering with slope-scaled bias and shadow distortion for smooth edges and extra resolution near the player. Reflective water & glass — screen-space reflections with analytic wave-normal ripples. Fresnel makes water dark when viewed head-on and mirror-like at grazing angles. Rain wetness — when it rains, flat, sky-exposed surfaces darken, gain gloss, and reflect both the sun/moon and nearby torch light. Melting ice — reflects roughly 3× stronger than water, with a slow, half-liquid surface. Dynamic sky — time-of-day gradient plus procedural clouds that thicken and desaturate toward gray during storms. Wind — leaves flutter with traveling gust fronts, grass and plants sway from the base, and sand gets a subtle shimmer. ACES tonemapping in a full linear-light pipeline.
Performance
A hybrid deferred pipeline shades each screen pixel once, with aggressive early-outs (reflections skip non-reflective pixels, shadow work is skipped where it can't matter) and no heavy volumetric raymarching. Built to run at high FPS on mid-range GPUs. Graceful fallbacks keep the pipeline from black-screening if a feature can't run on your setup.
Requirements
Minecraft Java Edition OptiFine or Iris (with Sodium) GLSL 120-compatible GPU
Installation
Download the .zip — do not unzip it. Place it in .minecraft/shaderpacks. In game: Options → Video Settings → Shaders, then select john's shaders.
Feedback
Bug reports and suggestions are welcome — tell me your GPU and Minecraft/Iris (or OptiFine) version so issues are easy to reproduce.