Solstice

Solstice

A Minecraft shader pack designed to balance striking visuals with smooth performance, combining a semi-realistic look with practical day-to-day playability.

Solstice v1.5

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

Features

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

Installation

1. Install Iris on Fabric. Iris is already included with Fabulously Optimized.
2. Place Solstice in Minecraft’s shaderpacks folder.
3. Open Video Settings → Shader Packs and select Solstice.
4. For the first launch, begin with the Medium profile.

Profiles

• Low: Uses blocky clouds, basic shadows, and disables most expensive effects.
• Medium: The standard gameplay preset, featuring volumetric clouds, materials, bloom, puddles, god rays, and balanced shadows.
• High: Improves shadow and cloud quality while enabling SSAO and screen-space reflections.
• Ultra: Delivers the highest cloud and shadow quality, mainly intended for screenshots or systems with powerful GPUs.

Lighting Style and colour settings are independent of the performance profile, so they can be adjusted separately.

Settings to Try

• Lighting Style: Survival is the darkest option, Balanced is the default, and Builder makes interiors brighter.
• Cloud Mode: Choose between Blocky 3D, Volumetric, or Off.
• Material Source: Use the built-in materials or select a LabPBR resource pack.
• Material Reflections: Choose Off, Sky Only, or SSR.
• Fog Density: Controls distance fog and can be reduced to zero.
• Water Murkiness: Adjusts underwater visibility.
• Colour Grade: Choose Natural, Vivid, or Classic.

Distant Horizons Support

Solstice provides its own LOD fog and side lighting. The following Distant Horizons settings are recommended:

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

Distant Horizons shadows are disabled because Iris may render the entire LOD range into the shadow map. Ordinary distant terrain and water will still receive proper shading.

LabPBR Materials

The built-in materials work with vanilla textures, although the effect is intentionally subtle. To reveal stronger normal-map detail and authored material properties:

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.

Try examining brick, cobblestone, polished stone, quartz, iron, gold, or copper under angled sunlight. Height-map parallax is not currently supported.

Performance Tuning

If the shader runs too slowly, lower the following settings in order:

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

The screenshot was captured with the Ultra profile on Minecraft 26.1. Actual performance will vary depending on the GPU, resolution, world, installed mods, and render distance.

Requirements

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

Common Problems

• Bright or dark Distant Horizons seams: Disable DH LOD Fog and LOD Side Shading.
• Underground LOD terrain remains visible: Enable Cave Culling and set Overdraw Prevention to 100%.
• Materials appear unchanged: Use a LabPBR 1.3 resource pack and select it under Material Source.
• Shader compilation fails: Provide the full Iris error along with the Minecraft, Iris, Distant Horizons, GPU, and driver versions.

See CHANGELOG.md for the complete version history.

Author

d0mkaaa (Domantas)