ESSENTIALS Shader

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A lightweight Minecraft shader with only essential VFX to simulate realistic effects such as shadows, sun rays, etc., to run on integrated GPUs.

There are lots of lightweight shaders, and they are said to preserve FPS well, but ESSENTIALS shader takes it to the BARE BONES next level with fake sunrays/moonrays, semi-realistic water, depth-based fogs, and much more. Yeah, it's probably the worst shader you have come across, but it will surely do what it was made for.

TARGET: The main target of this project is to make shaders also for iGPU users by BRUTALLY optimizing all the visual effects.

✨ Features

Lighting

• Warm sunlight, cool skylight
• Dynamic day/night cycle
• Nether specific lighting
• Fake sun rays & moon rays

Shadows

• Soft shadows
• Shadow distortion optimization

Atmosphere

• End dimension support
• Nether dimension support
• Simple fog
• Aurora effect (End)

Water

• Fresnel transparency effect
• Subtle wave animation
• Deep/shallow color mixing
• Sun specular highlight

⚙️ Benchmarks

The shader was tested on a HP Pro office computer from 2012 to prove the point of it's performance.

Component	Spec	Dimension	8 chunks	12 chunks
CPU	Intel Core i5-3340 @ 3.10GHz	Overworld	76 fps	64 fps
RAM	4 GB DDR3 (1 GB allocated)	Nether	63 fps	55 fps
GPU	Intel HD Graphics 2500 (iGPU)	End	119 fps	102 fps

📦 Installation

1. Download the shader zip
2. Open Minecraft and go to Options → Video Settings → Shader Packs
3. Click Open Shader Pack Folder
4. Drop the downloaded zip into the folder
5. Select ESSENTIALS Shader from the list
6. Done

Compatible with OptiFine 1.17+ and Iris (Higly Reccomended) 1.17+. Click to visit the download page.