Aetherstone

!Beach

About

Aetherstone is a stylized shader pack, built around staying comfortably playable on integrated graphics without giving up a painted, illustrated look. The shader is still under active development.

Aetherstone is not trying to be photorealistic. Stylized lighting, an (optional)ink outline, a warm terminator band and cool-tinted shadows give it a painted feel closer to a stylized RPG, while still running real dynamic shadows, real water effects, and a real procedural sky.W

Actual FPS depends heavily on your hardware, resource pack, render distance (including Distant Horizon's) and scene complexity, so no fixed benchmark number would be honest here.

Start on Recommended and move up or down the list from there. A good way to find the performance and visuals that are good for you, is also to not only change shader settings but also play around with real render distance and Distant Horizons' render distance. On weak hardware I recommend 6-12 real render distance with Distant Horizons turned off, or Distant Horizons 32 render distance and chunk quality on low/medium paired with 4-6 real render distance.

Mod support

• Distant Horizons — terrain and water render through the shader at LOD range, including the underwater ceiling past the normal render edge. DH's own shadow casting is intentionally not used; the shadow map stays independent of DH by design, after several attempts at combining them broke ordinary shadows. If you run DH alongside this pack, turn off DH's own cloud rendering in its settings (top-left icon in Video Settings) so it doesn't draw over this pack's clouds.

• Window Resizing / Resolution Bug Workaround

  Changing your window size, toggling fullscreen, or altering screen resolution while the shader is active can cause visual glitching. Workaround: Simply reload the shader pack. (You can do this by opening shader settings and toggling the pack off and back on, or by assigning a hotkey under Options → Controls → Key Binds → Iris ReloadShaders bind to r for example.)

• [Physics Mod Pro](get on Physics Mod creators Patreon for free) (Ocean Physics) full wave support for its ocean.

Installation

• First, install iris and Sodium Iris Sodium to be able to load shader packs.
• Launch the game and open Video Settings → Shader Packs.
• Click the button to open the shaderpacks folder.
• Download Aetherstone and place the zip file in that folder, do not unzip it!!
• Back in the game, select Aetherstone from the shader packs menu (refresh the list if it doesn't appear).
• In the Shaderpack settings, change profile and individual effects to liking.

Aetherstone requires Iris, and relies on Iris-specific features (custom texture binding for its water and caustic maps), so it is not compatible with OptiFine.

Support

If you'd like to support future development: 👉 Ko-fi

A very big Update has released, fixing many major bugs and improving playability, send me an E-mail and give me feedback so I can improve the shader even further: tarkprojectsfeedback@gmail.com