
It feels a little more like a novelty than other shaders because of how heavily stylised it is, but that doesn’t change how cool it can be to look at some of your proudest creations in this style. You might find a more stylistic approach more interesting, and that’s where Naelego’s Cel Shaders comes in, putting the cel-shaded style that games like Okami and Borderlands made popular into Minecraft. Godrays, bloom, and lens flares are great, but shaders aren’t all about dialling the lighting up to the max. It balances out colours well too, in the peak of sunshine, everything is vibrant, while in the evenings, the browns and oranges come out to their fullest. Water has more realistic waves, a photorealistic skybox stretches into the horizon, and there are godrays aplenty. It’s worth it if you can handle it, as this pack provides a lot of the little touches that Lagless leaves out, making for a more engaging visual experience. ProjectLUMA is the official successor to KUDA-Shaders, is another pack that tries to accommodate low-end PCs, but it goes a step up from Lagless, adding a lot of extra effects that take a little more processing power. Finally, the retextured and highly reflective water puts the final touches on this pretty picture of a pack that has helped make Minecraft the most viewed game on YouTube. Every block casts shadows in direct sunlight, and light sources glow more realistically. It provides a range of simple effects, all of which have been optimised for performance. Lagless Shaders was designed with low-end PCs in mind, and although it doesn’t go to the stunning heights of something like Continuum, it’s still a massive step up from Minecraft’s default lighting.
#MINECRAFT SHADERS HOW TO INSTALL 1.8 FORGE PC#
Just because you don’t have a great PC doesn’t mean you don’t get to enjoy shaders. Throw in a bunch of depth-of-field effects and just the right amount of motion blur, and you’ve got a joyful shader. The environments are so bright and happy that you lose yourself in the world.


Wandering around the world of Minecraft with this pack active makes you feel like you’re walking through a fairytale, no matter the world’s seed. Shots of this pack look more like stills from an animated feature than a video game, as it heaps on loads of cartoony effects and turns up the colour saturation as high as it will go. Moving away from realism, Triliton’s Shaderpack brings out the vibrant beauty that Minecraft holds. It is currently in development, but you can pay for early access. Continuum is the name of their shader pack, but the team is also working on Stratum, a hyper-realistic resource pack that pairs extremely well with Continuum’s shaders. That’s not all you can get from them, though. The team is currently working on a version of the pack that uses ray tracing, letting you finally have that luxury in Minecraft Java Edition. It requires a pretty beefy PC to run, but if you can you won’t regret it. When it comes to the idea of making Minecraft look as realistic as possible, Continuum sits at the top of the mountain. Launch Minecraft using the ‘Optifine’ profile.ĭrop your downloaded shaders into the folder. What’s more, the creators of shader packs take different approaches, and all light the world in uniquely beautiful ways.

These overhaul the game’s lighting engine, but in a far less resource-intensive way than RTX. Minecraft is one of the best games to play on PC, but if yours isn’t up to the task, don’t despair, you can use shaders to make Minecraft look pretty. The Minecraft RTX pack showed the world just how mind-blowing the game can look with the best graphical technology, but not everyone has the hardware to support it. That said, there is something that can make looking at grand creations more enjoyable, and that’s realistic lighting. Not only does it allow this open-world sandbox game to run on low-end hardware, but it brings a charm that was unique when the game first launched, and even now it still does the voxel style the best. A huge part of Minecraft’s charm is its low fidelity graphics.
