Realis

Realis Shaders Realis is a realism-focused shader pack for Minecraft Java 1.21.11 on Fabric + Iris.

The idea is simple: keep Minecraft recognisable — the same blocks, the same textures, the same shapes — and rebuild everything that happens around them. Light comes from a simulated atmosphere instead of a flat sky colour. Water moves, refracts and reflects. Rain actually changes the world: the ground darkens, puddles form, drops run down the walls, and it all dries again when the weather clears.

Realis is not a set of colour filters on top of the vanilla image. It is a full deferred rendering pipeline with its own sky, lighting, water and weather systems, and every heavy effect in it can be switched off or tuned.

Sky and atmosphere The sky is computed, not painted. Realis simulates how sunlight scatters in the air (Rayleigh, Mie and ozone), so the colours of the day follow from the position of the sun rather than from a preset gradient.

Sunrise, sunset and twilight come out naturally: a warm horizon, a cool zenith, long golden light, and a slow fade into blue dusk. Volumetric clouds. Cumulus clouds are real volumes with flat bases and billowing tops. They are lit by the sun from the side, shaded from within, and glow at the edges when the sun is behind them. A thin cirrus layer sits high above. Before rain the cover thickens and darkens. Clouds cast shadows that drift across the landscape. Night sky. Two layers of stars (a few bright twinkling ones and many faint ones), the band of the Milky Way, and a moon that is shaded as a sphere, so its phases look right. Shooting stars cross the sky now and then. Northern lights. On clear nights in snowy biomes, animated curtains of green, teal and violet light appear overhead and slowly change shape. They cast a faint green glow on the snow below. Rainbow. When the rain eases off and the sun is low, a rainbow appears opposite the sun — with a fainter second bow outside it. Sun glare. A soft glow, thin star rays and lens ghosts when you look towards the sun. It fades when the sun goes behind terrain or thick cloud, and can be turned off. Lighting Soft shadows with variable penumbra. Shadows are sharp where an object touches the ground and soften with distance, as they do in real sunlight. Short screen-space contact shadows catch the small details the shadow map misses. Coloured shadows. Stained glass tints the sunlight that passes through it. Tree crowns let a little green light through, so the shade under a tree is not flat grey. Sun flecks and light shafts. Sunlight breaks through leaves, windows and cave mouths as visible beams, and leaves patches of light on the ground. Ambient occlusion and global illumination. Corners and crevices are softly darkened, and light bounces once off nearby surfaces — a sunlit wall brightens the ground next to it, and lava tints the cave around it. Directional sky light. A wall facing the sunset is lit warm while the opposite wall stays blue, instead of every surface receiving the same average sky colour. Coloured block light. Light takes the colour of its source: soul fire is blue, redstone is red, sea lanterns are cyan, lava is orange, amethyst is violet. Ordinary torches and lanterns keep an adjustable warm colour temperature. Emissive blocks and handheld light. Glowstone, lanterns, lava, fire and many other blocks glow and bloom. A torch in your hand lights the area around you. Translucent foliage. Leaves and grass light up when the sun is behind them. Readable nights. Moonlight is cool and directional, shaded sides get a soft blue fill, and the exposure adapts — nights are dark, but not black. Water Procedural waves with sharp crests and wide troughs, several layers of different size and direction, plus fine ripples on top. The surface itself moves, not just its texture. Refraction. Things under the surface are visibly displaced by the waves. Depth-based colour. Shallow water is clear and light; deep water turns dark blue as red light is absorbed first. Biome water colour is respected and its influence is adjustable. Reflections of the world, the sky and the clouds, with a Fresnel effect: water is transparent when you look straight down and mirror-like at grazing angles. Sun and moon glitter on the waves. Shore foam where water meets land. Caustics. The waves focus sunlight into moving patterns on the bottom. Under water the light arrives as separate shafts, colour fades with distance, the image wobbles slightly, and small air bubbles rise in columns through the water — they are in the world, not on your screen. You disturb the water. Wading or swimming sends rings out from your body, and a swimming player leaves a V-shaped wake behind, the way a boat does. Jumping in makes a splash of rings that settles in a couple of seconds. Rain and weather Rain in Realis is a process, not a switch.

Gradual soaking. Surfaces go from dry to damp to wet over time. Porous materials — dirt, sand, wood, wool — darken and gain colour; stone and metal turn glossy. After the rain everything dries slowly. Puddles form in some places and not in others, with soft edges, reflections of the sky and surroundings, and rings from falling drops. Splash marks. Every drop that hits a block leaves a small dot that opens into a short-lived ring. Drops on walls and windows. Drops run down the sides of blocks and down window glass, leaving thin wet trails that break up into beads. From inside a house you can watch the rain on the window while the room stays dry. Rain under a roof stays outside. Wetness, puddles and drips only appear where rain can actually fall. Drops on the camera. Small clear droplets with refraction and a highlight settle on the lens, and some run down. They appear only under the open sky and clear within seconds when the rain stops. Rain itself is redrawn as thin, lit streaks of different sizes that lean with the wind. Overcast light. Under rain clouds the sun stops casting shadows and the world is lit by soft grey sky light. Fog thickens. Thunderstorms. Darker clouds, and lightning that briefly lights up the clouds and the landscape. Snow. In snowy biomes, snowfall slowly dusts everything that faces the sky — first single pixels, then patches, then a closed white layer — and it melts away again afterwards. Fog Fog is a real medium that is lit by the sun and the sky, not a colour blended over the distance.

Height fog that hugs the ground, thicker in humid biomes Morning mist that forms before sunrise and burns off during the morning Night haze, rain fog, and fog at the edge of the render distance that hides chunk borders Underwater, lava and powder-snow fog Post-processing HDR rendering from start to finish, with eye adaptation: the exposure adjusts when you walk out of a cave or into a dark forest. Tone mapping: ACES (default), Hable filmic, or Reinhard. Temporal anti-aliasing, which also cleans up the fine noise of clouds, shadows and reflections. Bloom around bright light sources, sharpening, a subtle vignette. Heat haze above lava and fire. Optional depth of field with autofocus and optional motion blur — both off by default. Exposure, contrast and saturation sliders. Animation Grass, flowers, crops and tall plants sway in the wind; so do leaves and vines. Hanging lanterns swing like pendulums. The wind picks up during storms. Shadows move together with the plants. Other dimensions The Nether: drifting smoke in the colour of the biome and a furnace glow rising from the lava sea. The End: a slowly moving violet and teal nebula and a field of stars over the void. Resource packs Realis works with vanilla textures and with any ordinary resource pack. If your pack includes labPBR material maps, Realis uses them: normal maps for surface relief, and specular maps for smoothness, metal and glow.

Settings Everything is configurable from the shader options screen (available in English and Russian).

Quality presets: LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH, ULTRA and EXTREME. LOW is meant for weak graphics cards, HIGH is the default, EXTREME favours image quality over frame rate.

Sections: Lighting · Shadows · Sky and Atmosphere · Clouds · Water · Reflections · Rain and Weather · Fog and Light Shafts · Post Processing · Foliage.

Every heavy effect has its own switch, and most have a quality or strength slider: shadow resolution and distance, cloud quality, wave height and speed, reflection quality, puddle amount, how fast the world gets wet and dries, fog density, bloom strength, and many more.

If the frame rate is too low, try these first:

Pick a lower preset. Lower Cloud Quality — clouds are the most expensive single effect. Lower Shadow Resolution and Shadow Distance. Turn off Global Illumination, then Volumetric Fog. Requirements Minecraft Java Edition 1.21.11 Fabric Loader Iris and Sodium — developed and tested on Iris 1.10.8 with Sodium 0.8.14 OptiFine is not supported: the pack relies on features that only Iris provides.

Installation Install Fabric, Sodium and Iris. Put the downloaded .zip file into the .minecraft/shaderpacks folder. Do not unpack it. In game open Options → Video Settings → Shader Packs and select Realis. Open Shader Pack Settings to choose a quality preset. Known limitations Screen-space effects. Reflections, global illumination and coloured block light are computed from what is on screen. Something outside the view is not reflected (the sky is shown instead), and light is only coloured by sources you can currently see. Shadows. Iris provides one shadow map. Realis concentrates its detail around the player, so shadows are crisp nearby and softer far away. Refraction shows only solid blocks behind the water, not other translucent blocks such as glass.