Metal Shaders 1.2.2-alpha

Metal Shaders 1.2.2-alpha

Fixes and Distant Horizons presets, on top of 1.2.1:

• Water no longer disappears with the Fabulous graphics preset. Fabulous turns on Minecraft's Improved Transparency, which the shaders keep off (they draw water, glass and rain themselves), and the water, glass and ice ended up drawn by nobody. Happened with and without Distant Horizons.
• Distant Horizons' far water always gets the shaders' water (reflections, waves), even when DH's own transparency is off (DH's Low preset turns it off, which made the far water flat vanilla blue).
• Distant Horizons presets: Shaders... → Performance → Distant Horizons (only shown with DH installed): DH's own / Performance (32 chunks) / Balanced (64, the default) / Quality (96) / Ultra (128), tested with the shaders. On an M4 at 1080p with 8 normal chunks: about 168 / 134 / 114 / 109 FPS. DH's own settings file isn't changed.

Same look and FPS as 1.2.1 otherwise. Updating: swap the jar in your mods folder.

Requirements: Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer), macOS 15 or later, Minecraft 26.3 with Fabric Loader 0.19.5 (Java 25). No Sodium. Optional: Distant Horizons 3.3.4 + Fabric API.

Metal Shaders 1.2.1-alpha

Metal Shaders 1.2.1-alpha

A small update on top of 1.2:

• Shaders On/Off switch: Shaders... → General → Shaders: On/Off. With Off, the game runs plain mcopt 0.3 after a restart
  (Metal without effects, more FPS). The pause menu keeps its Shaders... button so you can turn them back on. Your settings are kept.
• ☕ Support button: a small button in the top-right corner of the Shaders... screen opens my Ko-fi page (it asks first).
  Metal Shaders is free and will stay free.

Same look and same FPS as 1.2. Updating: swap the jar in your mods folder.

Requirements: Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer), macOS 15 or later, Minecraft 26.3 with Fabric Loader 0.19.5 (Java 25). No Sodium.
Optional: Distant Horizons 3.3.4 + Fabric API.

Metal Shaders 1.2 alpha

Big update: no more Sodium, an in-game settings menu, and macOS 15 Sequoia to macOS 27.

New

• Settings menu: pause → Shaders... About 120 settings on 11 pages (lighting, shadows, colour and camera, atmosphere, god rays, clouds, night sky, water, weather, Nether and End, performance), in English or Spanish following the game's language. Most of them change live behind the menu; the ones marked * apply after a restart. Everything is saved in config/mcopt.properties.
• Blocky clouds: Minecraft's own cloud shapes (from the game's texture, resource packs too) with volume, sunset light, shadows on the ground, god rays and reflections. Or the volumetric clouds, the game's normal clouds, or none.
• No Sodium needed: this version is built on mcopt 0.3, which draws the terrain itself. Everything is Apache-2.0 now (with MIT parts from Photon), which also means it can go on Modrinth.
• macOS 15 Sequoia is supported (it needed macOS 26 before), and it's tested on macOS 27.
• Faster first load: the shaders compile in parallel in the background. Right after installing or updating macOS, entering a world stalled ~2.4 s on an M4; now ~0.15 s.
• Scene reflections: Off (Water page): sky-only reflections, about +9 % FPS next to big lakes on slower Macs.
• For macOS 27 and tearing reports: Performance → Compatibility has No tearing (on by default) and Shader math: Fast / Precise. Frames are now paced to the display the game is on (with an external monitor it used the main display's refresh rate). latest.log has a line with the macOS build and your screens, handy for bug reports.

Performance: the same as 1.1 on a MacBook Pro M4 (balanced, full resolution, alternating both versions): +0.8 % in our lake test, −1.1 % when flying fast over new terrain; with Distant Horizons +1.6 % / −0.5 %. mcopt 0.3 also builds chunks with less CPU work, so loading new terrain stutters less.

Small differences from 1.0: smooth lighting and ambient occlusion now come from the game itself (they came from Sodium), so a few corners look slightly different.

Install / update

1. Fabric Loader 0.19.5+ for Minecraft 26.3, Java 25, Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 15 or later.
2. Remove Sodium from mods/ (the game won't start with it) and replace the old jar with metal-shaders-1.2.0-alpha.jar.
3. Your settings are kept. (An old profile=alpha line in config/mcopt.properties changes to profile=indie by itself.)

Optional: Distant Horizons 3.3.4 + Fabric API. The videos and photos are in the 1.0-alpha release.

Thanks to everyone on Reddit who asked for the settings menu, blocky clouds, Sequoia support and the move to mcopt 0.3. Found a bug? Open an issue (the [mcopt] shade: system: line from latest.log helps a lot).

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Español: menú de ajustes (pausa → Shaders..., unos 120 ajustes en español), nubes cuadradas, ya no necesita Sodium (quítalo de mods/), funciona en macOS 15 Sequoia, 26 y 27, y carga más rápido la primera vez. Cambia el jar viejo por este; tus ajustes se conservan.

Metal Shaders 1.0 alpha 4

Rain fix: wet blocks look natural now.

Fixed:

• Walls in the rain (pits, cliffs, the steps of a hill) no longer look whitish, as if they reflected a sky that isn't there. They just get a little darker and damp. This also removes the dark, half-transparent "sphere" with a block grid that could show over valleys in the rain.
• Wet grass and leaves no longer turn almost black: they keep their green (wet grass is now about 72 % as bright as dry, it was 32 %). Stone, dirt and wood still darken when wet.
• Fewer puddles on grass, and less mirror-like, so lawns don't look like glass slabs from the side. Stone, dirt and paths keep their puddles and reflections.

Slightly faster in the rain too (about +1.5 % FPS). Includes the fixes from 1.0-alpha.2 (Distant Horizons dark lower half) and 1.0-alpha.3 (rain turning the ground white).

Install: Fabric Loader 0.19.5+ for 26.3 on Java 25, plus Sodium 0.9.3-alpha.1. Replace the old jar in mods/ with metal-shaders-1.0-alpha.4.jar. Optional: Distant Horizons 3.3.4 + Fabric API. The videos and photos are in the 1.0-alpha release.

Found another bug? Please open an issue or tell me on Reddit/X, with a screenshot if you can.

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Español: con lluvia, las paredes ya no se ven blancuzcas, el pasto mojado ya no se pone casi negro y tiene menos charcos. Cambia el jar viejo de mods/ por este.

Metal Shaders 1.0 alpha 3

Bug fix: rain no longer turns the ground white.

Fixed: in places that aren't snowy, rain could paint the ground flat white (with dark patches), especially on mountains and in taigas. Now rain only makes the ground wet and reflective, with puddles. The shaders' snow cover only shows in snowy biomes (snowy plains, snowy taigas and slopes, frozen peaks), and it keeps a bit of the block's texture.

Also includes the Distant Horizons fix from 1.0-alpha.2 (dark lower half of the screen with DH's default settings).

Install: Fabric Loader 0.19.5+ for 26.3 on Java 25, plus Sodium 0.9.3-alpha.1. Replace the old jar in mods/ with metal-shaders-1.0-alpha.3.jar. Optional: Distant Horizons 3.3.4 + Fabric API. The videos and photos are in the 1.0-alpha release.

Found another bug? Please open an issue or tell me on Reddit/X, with a screenshot if you can.

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Español: la lluvia ya no pinta de blanco el suelo donde no es nevado: ahora solo lo moja y lo deja reflejante. Incluye también el arreglo de Distant Horizons de la 1.0-alpha.2. Cambia el jar viejo de mods/ por este.

Metal Shaders 1.0 alpha 2

Bug fix for Distant Horizons users.

Fixed: with Distant Horizons installed, the bottom half of the screen could look dark while the top half (the sky) looked normal. DH ships with Vanilla Fade Mode set to DOUBLE_PASS, which clashes with the shaders and wipes the near terrain. The mod now sets it to NONE in config/DistantHorizons.toml at startup, before DH reads it (only that one line changes; SINGLE_PASS and NONE are left as they are). Thanks to RadianMay on r/macgaming for the report.

Still on 1.0-alpha? Set vanillaFadeMode = "NONE" in config/DistantHorizons.toml and restart the game.

Install: same as 1.0-alpha: Fabric Loader 0.19.5+ for 26.3 on Java 25, plus Sodium 0.9.3-alpha.1. Replace the old jar in mods/ with metal-shaders-1.0-alpha.2.jar. Optional: Distant Horizons 3.3.4 + Fabric API. The videos and photos are in the 1.0-alpha release.

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Español: arreglo para Distant Horizons. Con DH, la mitad de abajo de la pantalla podía verse oscura (la opción "Vanilla Fade Mode" de DH viene en DOUBLE_PASS). Ahora el mod la pone en NONE al arrancar. Cambia el jar viejo de mods/ por este.

Metal Shaders 1.0 alpha

First public alpha of Metal Shaders: native Metal shaders for Minecraft: Java Edition 26.3 on Apple Silicon Macs.

Install: Fabric Loader 0.19.5+ for 26.3 on Java 25, plus Sodium 0.9.3-alpha.1. Put metal-shaders-1.0-alpha.jar and the Sodium jar in mods/. The shaders turn on by themselves on the first launch (balanced preset); settings in config/mcopt.properties. Optional: Distant Horizons 3.3.4 + Fabric API.

Needs an Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 26 or later. Alpha: back up your worlds.

Assets

• metal-shaders-1.0-alpha.jar — the mod (SHA-256 in the .sha256 file)
• metal-shaders-showcase.mp4 — 85 s showcase, recorded in-game on a MacBook Pro M4
• metal-shaders-presets.mp4 — every preset at 3024×1964, 1440p and 1080p with F3
• metal-shaders-photos.zip — 17 full-resolution screenshots

Built from main (mcopt 0.2.0-alpha.3 + the shading work up to FT2.12).

Updated 2026-10-11: the jar now shows the pause-menu buttons (Resolution / Output) in English, or in Spanish when the game is in Spanish (commit c6fd9c3). Same file name; new SHA-256 in the .sha256 file.

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Español: primera versión pública. Instala Fabric 0.19.5 (26.3, Java 25) y Sodium 0.9.3-alpha.1, pon el jar en mods/ y abre el juego: los shaders se activan solos. Solo Macs con Apple Silicon y macOS 26.