Cealith Shaders is a lightweight vanilla+ shaderpack for Minecraft Java Edition, focused on beautiful lighting, natural colors, atmospheric skies, and realistic water while keeping performance in mind.
Designed to enhance Minecraft without changing its familiar visual style, Cealith adds subtle effects that make the world feel more alive without overwhelming it.
⚠️IMPORTANT:
Cealith Shaders is developed and maintained by CoolSantyx. This Modrinth page is an official source for Cealith Shaders downloads, updates, and changelogs.
Features
- Soft dynamic shadows.
- Bright and natural lighting.
- Enhanced skies, sunrises, and sunsets.
- Darker and more atmospheric nights.
- Improved cloud shading.
- Atmospheric fog.
- Realistic translucent water with depth, reflections, sun glints, and animated waves.
- Refined colors and contrast.
Performance
Cealith is designed to provide a balance between visual quality and performance, avoiding demanding effects such as ray tracing, path tracing, volumetric clouds, POM, and heavy screen-space effects.
Three performance profiles are included:
LOW — For lower-end systems. BALANCED — Recommended for most systems. HIGH — For systems with additional GPU headroom.
Compatibility
Cealith Shaders is designed for Minecraft Java Edition 1.16.5–26.3 and shader loaders such as Iris and OptiFine.
Performance may vary depending on your hardware, resolution, render distance, resource packs, and other installed mods.
All Versions
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### Fixed
- Day/night cycle:** the sun angle was being read incorrectly, so the pack almost never switched to night. Nights, dusk and dawn now work properly, and distant terrain and sky no longer look like daytime after dark.
- Sky:** the gradient is now calculated per pixel in world space, so it no longer shifts when you look up or down.
- Translucent blocks:** glass, ice and similar blocks are no longer shaded as water.
- Water normals and depth:** reflections no longer change depending on where you look, and water depth is read correctly.
### Improved
- Water:**
- layered animated waves
- reflections of the real sky at any time of day
- sun glints by day and a moon path at night
- depth-based color
- animated shoreline foam
- no sky reflection under roofs
- Night:** darker but readable, torches and block light stay bright, and fog matches the night horizon.
### Shader Pack Settings
- Added **Night Brightness** option (default 1.0).
- Added missing menu labels and option descriptions.
- Verified all options and the LOW / BALANCED / HIGH profiles.
### Fixed
- Fixed vanilla star detection issues in the sky rendering.
- Fixed entity color overlays not being properly applied.
- Improved the day/night transition of terrain shadows to prevent abrupt changes.
- Improved water depth sampling to reduce edge-related rendering artifacts.
- Added protection against invalid vector normalization that could cause visual artifacts.
- Made render target usage more explicit for improved shader compatibility.
### Compatibility
- Maintains the existing Cealith Shaders visual style and rendering approach.
- No intentional changes to the overall color palette, lighting style, water appearance, clouds, fog, or performance profiles.
- Continues to use the existing shader structure and compatibility approach from 1.1.0.
This update is focused on improving reliability and fixing rendering issues without changing what makes Cealith Shaders look like Cealith.
- Improved shader performance and reduced unnecessary GPU workload
- Preserved and refined the realistic water rendering
- Significantly darker and more natural nighttime lighting
- Improved shadow performance and rendering
- Optimized clouds and post-processing effects
- Refined overall lighting while maintaining the original Cealith look
- Various shader optimizations and bug fixes
- Improved daytime lighting
- Darker and more natural nights
- Enhanced clouds
- Refined overall visuals
