RustingShader

A cinematic Iris shader pack for Minecraft, with a black hole in the End.

Soft PCSS shadows, deferred water with reflections and caustics, volumetric clouds and light, a real phased moon, and an End that looks like the last place in the universe. Plain GLSL 1.20, no build step: drop the folder in and play.

Screenshots

The End

Rain

Water

Sunset

Night and moon

Nether

Glow

What is included

Glow

• Every light source gets a soft colored halo from its own emission buffer, tight neon edge plus wide bloom
• Redstone glows: dust (brighter with more power), blocks, torches, lit ore, powered repeaters, comparators and observers
• Furnace and candle flames, crystals, sculk, glow berries, Nether portal, copper bulbs, froglights
• Glowing mobs (blazes, glow squids, allays, End crystals), spider and enderman eyes, beacon beams, flame particles
• Held and dropped light items glow; holding a torch lights up the area around you
• Gems in ores sparkle a little (can be turned off)

Overworld

• Deferred lighting with PCSS soft shadows, warm torch light and glowing emissive blocks
• Waving plants and leaves
• Volumetric clouds that cast shadows on the ground
• Volumetric light (god rays), ground fog in valleys, aurora on clear nights
• Round moon with real phases, maria, craters and earthshine
• Softer, desaturated rain instead of the blue streaks
• Rain soaks the world: ground darkens, puddles form in the dips and reflect the sky, drops ring on water and puddles

Water

• Animated waves, refraction, screen-space reflections with sky fallback
• Shoreline foam and caustics
• Underwater: Snell's window, light shafts, depth-based absorption

Nether

• Full support with its own fog and lighting

End

• A gravitationally lensed black hole: photon ring, tilted accretion disk with Kepler rotation and Doppler beaming, and the far side of the disk bent over the top of the horizon
• Volumetric smoke drifting between the islands
• Two styles, switchable in settings:
  • Empty (default): almost colorless, infinitely deep, quiet. Horror at the end of everything.
  • Colored: violet nebulae and a dense starfield.

Post

• Bloom, auto exposure, lens flare, ACES tonemap, color grading, vignette

Requirements

• Minecraft Java Edition with Iris (tested on Iris 1.11.6 + Sodium 0.9.3, Minecraft 26.3)
• A GPU that handles OpenGL 3.x shader packs comfortably. Developed on an RTX 3060.

Installation

1. Install Iris (with Sodium).
2. Download RustingShader-vX.Y.zip from the Releases page and put it, still zipped, into .minecraft/shaderpacks/. (The green "Code → Download ZIP" button does not work directly: it wraps everything in an extra folder, so Iris cannot find shaders/.)
3. In game: Options → Video Settings → Shader Packs → RustingShader.

Press R in game (Iris reload key) after editing a shader.

Settings

Everything is in the in-game shader menu, grouped into screens: shadows, lighting, water, clouds, sky, post-processing, and End. Defaults live in shaders/lib/settings.glsl.

Most useful knobs:

Setting	What it does
END_STYLE	Empty (horror, colorless) or Colored (nebulae) End
BH_SIZE, BH_SPIN, BH_BRIGHTNESS	Black hole size, disk rotation speed, disk brightness
END_SMOKE_HEIGHT, END_SMOKE_DENSITY	Where and how thick the End smoke is
GLOW_STRENGTH, EMISSIVE_STRENGTH	Halo size around lights, brightness of glowing pixels
SHADOW_SOFTNESS	Contact-hardening shadow blur
CLOUD_COVERAGE, CLOUD_STEPS	Cloud amount and quality (steps cost the most)
VL_STEPS	God ray quality
MOON_SIZE, MOON_BRIGHTNESS	Custom moon
RAIN_OPACITY	How visible rain is
PUDDLES, PUDDLE_AMOUNT	Reflective rain puddles and how much ground they cover

On a weaker GPU, lower CLOUD_STEPS, VL_STEPS and shadowMapResolution first.

Development

shaders/
  lib/         shared code: settings, noise, sky, shadows, clouds, End
  program/     the real pass code
  *.fsh/*.vsh  thin wrappers that #define flags and #include a program
  world-1/     Nether wrappers (NO_SKY)
  world1/      End wrappers (NO_SKY + END)
tools/
  check.py     compiles every program in every dimension with glslangValidator
  preview.py   renders the End sky to a PNG on the GPU (moderngl)
  glowtest.py  renders the glow halo on a test image, same code as in game

python3 tools/check.py            # prints "all OK" or the failing program
python3 tools/preview.py out.png  # needs moderngl, numpy, pillow

License

RustingShader is released under the RustingShader License 1.0. You may use, modify and redistribute it, including in modpacks and commercial content, as long as you keep the license and credit the original author.