Solstice v1.5

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Solstice is a semi-realistic Minecraft shader with adjustable effects and four performance profiles. It is developed on an RX 6600 at 1440p.

Features

• Soft shadows, moving foliage, coloured glass shadows, and underwater caustics.
• Blocky 3D or volumetric clouds with cloud shadows and changing weather.
• Reflective water, waves, rain ripples, underwater fog, and god rays.
• Rain puddles, glowing blocks, portal light, snow sparkle, and animated flames.
• A circular sun and moon, stars, meteors, the Milky Way, and occasional auroras.
• Built-in materials for some vanilla metals and polished blocks.
• LabPBR 1.3 normal, material, AO, and emissive map support.
• Distant Horizons terrain and water support in the Overworld, Nether, and End.
• Bloom, FXAA, colour grading, optional sharpening, and contact shadows.
• Separate Survival, Balanced, and Builder lighting styles.

Install

1. Install Iris on Fabric. Iris is already included with Fabulously Optimized.
2. Put Solstice in the Minecraft shaderpacks folder.
3. Select it under Video Settings → Shader Packs.
4. Start with the Medium profile.

Profiles

• Low: blocky clouds, basic shadows, and most expensive effects disabled.
• Medium: the normal gameplay preset. Volumetric clouds, materials, bloom, puddles, god rays, and balanced shadows.
• High: better shadows and clouds, SSAO, and screen-space reflections.
• Ultra: maximum cloud and shadow quality. Mainly intended for screenshots or fast GPUs.

Lighting Style and colour settings are separate from the performance profile.

Settings to try

• Lighting Style: Survival is darkest, Balanced is the default, and Builder brightens interiors.
• Cloud Mode: choose Blocky 3D, Volumetric, or Off.
• Material Source: choose built-in materials or a LabPBR resource pack.
• Material Reflections: Off, Sky Only, or SSR.
• Fog Density: controls distance fog and can be set to zero.
• Water Murkiness: controls underwater visibility.
• Colour Grade: Natural, Vivid, or Classic.

Distant Horizons

Solstice supplies its own LOD fog and side lighting. Recommended DH settings:

• LOD Fog: Off
• LOD Side Shading: Off
• Cave Culling: On, height around 60
• Overdraw Prevention: 100%
• Max Horizontal Resolution: Block
• Horizontal and Vertical Quality: High for normal play

DH shadows are disabled because Iris may render the whole LOD range into the shadow map. Normal distant terrain and water are still shaded.

LabPBR

Built-in materials work with vanilla textures, but the effect is subtle. For visible normal maps and authored material detail:

1. Install a LabPBR 1.3 resource pack.
2. Enable Materials.
3. Set Material Source to LabPBR Resource Pack.
4. Set Material Reflections to SSR.

Check brick, cobblestone, polished stone, quartz, iron, gold, or copper in angled sunlight. Height-map parallax is not supported yet.

Performance

If the shader is too slow, lower these settings in order:

1. Shadow Resolution
2. Shadow Distance
3. Shadow Filter Quality
4. Cloud Quality
5. SSR Quality, SSAO, or material reflections

Captured with Ultra on Minecraft 26.1. Results depend on the GPU, resolution, world, mods, and render distance.

Requirements

• Minecraft 26.2 on Fabric
• Iris 1.11.2 for the full feature set
• Distant Horizons 3.2.0 for LOD support
• OptiFine is not officially supported

Common problems

• Bright or dark DH seam: disable DH LOD Fog and LOD Side Shading.
• Underground LOD terrain is visible: enable Cave Culling and set Overdraw Prevention to 100%.
• Materials look unchanged: use a LabPBR 1.3 pack and select it as the Material Source.
• Shader compilation fails: send the full Iris error together with the Minecraft, Iris, DH, GPU, and driver versions.

See CHANGELOG.md for the full version history.

Author

d0mkaaa (Domantas)