Overview

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

Install Iris (with Sodium).
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/.)
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

text

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.

Start

Reference