Icarus Shaders -September 2025 (early access updates)

What's New This Week (Quick):

• Fixed Colored Shadows (read below)

• SSR can be disabled

• Water as seen here: https://youtu.be/qqs34ZhdQ9s?si=fchQgciWrOViqv3O

• Some stuff might be broken, I'm in the middle of a lot but won't get more done this week

• Full change logs are below ...

Info:

Developed for iris, tested in minecraft 1.20.1 (and 1.21.8) If you get bugs in other mc versions let me know!

Version Numbers: 

• version numbers are the date I made them, the newest is usually the best. (It's Year-month-day format)

• for example 'Icarus v 2025 -3-29' is the version of the shader I uploaded on March 29th 2025

Extra Attachments:

• Inside of the shader.zip file is a folder called 'Extras' which has Extra stuff in it that you can use for extra features, including config files and resource packs.

Modpack / Test Environment: 

• this is my main test environment: https://modrinth.com/modpack/timetravelbeards-1.20.1-modpack

• I also usually test newer mc versions with the 'Fabulously Optimized' modpack or just plain Iris & Sodium

Versions Changelogs:

2025-9-22:

• this version might be half broken on some stuff, I am in the middle of changing a lot. But I won't get any better done this week, I am in the middle of a big mess getting waves to go as far as you can see

• fixed soft shadows from colored glass (but option might need to be turned on)

• Option to disable all Screen Space Reflection Data (per request)

• Water Stuff I am redoing as seen here: https://youtu.be/qqs34ZhdQ9s?si=n-beYBfSNLyLDclz

2025-9-19:

• Completely Revamped Integrated PBR System (better materials & lighting even where no pbr textures)

  • New Menus & Cleaner Menus

  • New Smart-IPBR

  • generates textures only when needed

  • enhances labpbr format where it can

  • optional enhancements / Overrides for textures

• I-PBR Support for Conquest Reforged / ArdaCraft

  • Including Plants, glass, & metals for ALL variants of blocks (hopefully)

  • Full porosity / roughness support coming soon

  • I made custom scripts to generate exhaustive ipbr lists

• Fixed Buggy shadow blobs from Distant Horizons

  • Just deleted the distant Horizons shadow program for now, it's waiting on Iris/DH to fix this better

• Stained Glass is a bit better, but not finished yet

  • less bright & flickery

  • no fixed colored shadowmap from Sun/Moon yet

• Next

  • I really need to tackle colored glass problems with shadowmaps

  • I want to try to fix colored glass & water rendering before the end of the month

2025-9-12:

• Completely Reworked Light Scatter through Materials (SSS or Sub-Surface Scattering)

  • Leaves, Grass, Plants, Forests & Swamps should look a lot better

  • Honey Comb can be used to create really interesting accent lighting

  • Right Now this is hard-coded for some of it, I will work on Auto-Detection later. It's hard to pack more data and not lose more fps

• Bloom & Lens Flares

  • Lower strength on defaults

  • Dynamically appearing Star-Shaped Flares also defaulted On

  • Still waiting on the Poll to get more votes about what you'd like the defaults to be

• Tonemapping

  • Defaulting to the 'unreal' style tonemapping now

  • Outside looks better with this since bloom was redone

  • Caves look darker, let me know how you feel about this, I can make adjustments

    • SEE HERE about changing Cave Darkness: https://youtu.be/y70cxTKg2g8?si=fo94HG979zHJgPip

• Fog

  • Fog changed from linear to exponential when using the default 'Pegasus' Volumetric renderer

  • Adjust the fog in 'Nature & Atmosphere/Fog/' and it's towards the bottom

• Seamless 3D Textures

  • The CTM/POM-Fix no longer has flickering

  • 3D Material transitions work again

  • I updated the curseforge for textures to include the 'borders' now for that

• Next

  • I really need to tackle colored glass problems with shadowmaps

  • I want to try to fix colored glass & water rendering

2025-9-5:

Menu Clean Up:

- Profiles Re-benchmarked in 1.21.8 (some presets are running better, some worse, some the same)

- Better Color Coding of the presets by fps to show range better at a quick glance

- Better presets description page in 'Help & Info'

- Bloom & Lens Flares Menus

- Help & Info Updated

- Manual Exposure setting added to Bloom page since both affect Overall Brightness and it's good to adjust side by side for artistic control

- A few missing tooltips have been added

- 'Profile Changes' page updated

Bloom & Lens Flares

- In 'Camera & Color & Effects/Bloom & Lens Flares' they are On by default but can be turned Off

- Mostly complete and defaulted to using the new 'Style 5'

- Much more Optimized

- Much more subtle

- Very Adjustable

- Menus are complete with tooltips

- Lens Flaes are also defaulted On, but much more subtle than in previous test build

- Star Shaped Flares can be added on top of the Bloom, not only as a type of bloom, these are defaulted Off

- Star shaped flares appear dynamically

- Removed buggy artifacts from Kawase Bloom

- added HDR toggle for lens flares, defaulted On, might save a few fps off idk, but it looks better On

-'Dirty Screen' effect is less strong, and more adjustable

Brightness:

- Lowered AutoExposure 'Low' to rebalance with the new bloom, so that bloom isn't too bright in caves.

Presets:

- Added 'Flood fill' preset that uses floodfill, but not pathtracing, for colored lighting, and is faster than 'Hybrid' and better looking than 'Classic Low'.

- Fixed lack of ambient sky light on presets: 'Classic Low' and 'Grass Test (Low)'

- renamed 'Classic (Low)' to 'Classic (Very Low)' to emphasize that it's not path tracing but only raytracing

- 'Textures in Reflections' changed from 'none' to 'color' on all 'Medium' presets. I only saw 0 to 1 fps loss, but this was the one setting I changed in 'Medium Hybrid' all the time

Performance:

- All profiles re-benchmarked, there have been performance changes in 1.21.8 vs 1.20.1

- Star shaped flares are now 4x faster than before

- kawase bloom is much more optimized

- lens flares optimized

- Floodfill preset added

-'Quick Performance/Tracing Steps / Distance' can now be turned lower. Setting to 0 uses floodfill but no pathtracing. 20 or 10 might suit you and will run better than the default 30.

- 'Textures in Reflections' changed from 'none' to 'color' on all 'Medium' presets. I only saw 0 to 1 fps loss, but this was the one setting I changed in 'Medium Hybrid' all the time

Known Issues:

- Bloom style 0 (old) is broken

- It's a bit bright outside, I'm trying to tune the bloom / brightness balance right for artistic control. In the bloom menu you can change the main exposure value or lower bloom

- water surface and stained glass have a lot of issues, I want to focus on these a lot this month

What's Next: (not all will get done soon)

-trying to fix the issues with 3D material transitions

- Better control of the bloom (style 5), with per mip spectrum control

- Water surface / stained glass needs work

- Fixing 3d Texture material transitions was next on the last Poll after Bloom

- 'Black hole' integrated into 'the End'

- 'water wakes' shader I tested and showed online

- Better Lighting via making the denoiser hdr and offscren diffues multi-bounce caching

- Faster 'Floodfill' preset (like almost double fps, I'm just fighting some settings combinations)

- I want to port the customizability and richness of the 'Just Colored Lighting' shader's colored lighting core, Icarus imported a very old version of it

- local exposure levels

- directly control floodfill contribution on terrain & entities via slider, not just toggle

Downloads are below for Supporters:

versions: