Sulkan
Sulkan is a client-side Fabric mod that adds native shader support to Minecraft's Vulkan renderer.
Built on Sodium, Sulkan provides a dedicated Vulkan shader pipeline, a built-in shader pack, and support for native Sulkan shader packs. It is designed for Minecraft 26.2 and requires a Vulkan-capable GPU and driver.
Features
- Native shader rendering on Minecraft's Vulkan backend
- Built-in Sulkan Realistic shader pack
- Shadows, ambient occlusion, water, clouds, atmosphere, bloom, and FXAA
- In-game shader settings and quality controls
- Support for native Sulkan shader packs
- Vulkan 1.2 shader compilation
- Client-side Fabric mod built on Sodium
Requirements
- Minecraft Java Edition 26.2
- Fabric Loader 0.18.4 or newer
- Fabric API 0.155.0 or newer for Minecraft 26.2
- Sodium 0.9.1 or newer for Minecraft 26.2
- Java 25 or newer
- A Vulkan-capable GPU with up-to-date drivers
Sulkan is client-side only and should not be installed on a dedicated server.
Installation
- Install Fabric for Minecraft 26.2.
- Install the matching versions of Fabric API and Sodium.
- Download Sulkan from Modrinth or CurseForge.
- Place the Sulkan JAR in your client's
modsfolder. - Launch Minecraft and open Video Settings → Shaders.
The built-in Sulkan Realistic pack is included with the mod and does not need to be installed separately.
Shader packs
Sulkan uses its own native shader-pack format. External packs must include a sulkan.json manifest and can be installed as a folder or ZIP directly inside the game's shaders/ directory.
See the shader-pack documentation before creating or installing a native Sulkan pack.
Unmodified Iris and OptiFine shader packs are not supported.
Compatibility
Sulkan is designed for Minecraft's Vulkan renderer and the Fabric/Sodium stack. Mods that depend on OpenGL behavior, replace the renderer, or make direct OpenGL calls may be incompatible.
Sodium is required and is not bundled with Sulkan.
If Minecraft falls back to OpenGL, Sulkan pauses its shader effects and explains the situation on the title screen. Driver updates, GPU selection, or Vulkan support may affect whether the renderer starts successfully.
Links
Reporting issues
Before reporting a problem, test with only Fabric API, Sodium, and Sulkan installed.
Please include:
- Minecraft, Fabric Loader, Fabric API, Sodium, and Sulkan versions
- GPU and driver version
- Operating system
- Full client log or crash report
- Steps to reproduce the issue
All Versions
+ Add Version
### Water (Sulkan Realistic)
- Faster reflections: water viewed from above skips reflection tracing, and reflection quality 1–3 traces half the pixels and fills in the rest
- Fewer cloud samples in reflected clouds
### Shadows
- Fixed striped shadow artifacts on surfaces close to the camera
- Fixed shadows disappearing at the edge of the view when turning
- Fixed tall distant casters (hills, trees at low sun) losing their shadows past the second cascade
- Smoother transitions between shadow cascades
- Fixed slow shadow drift on the nearest cascade
- Faster near shadows: terrain is cached, and entities and wind-animated plants are drawn on top each frame
- Removed held-item (torch) shadows
### Engine
- Detects GPU features (float16, subgroups, Apple/MoltenVK) and uses them
- Vulkan pipeline cache saved to disk for faster startup
- Packs can set per-platform option and resource overrides
- Clear error when a pack pass uses more textures than the GPU allows
### Shader packs / UI
- Shader folder moved from
shaders/toshaderpacks/, with automatic migration - Iris/OptiFine packs are hidden and their count is shown
- Shaders screen no longer rescans the disk every frame
- Clicking the selected pack retries it if it failed to load
- Fixed shadow glitch bugs
- Ice reflections
- Reduced fog
- Auto exposure
- updated to 26.3
- hand held lights + dynamic shadows
- improved shader perf
- bug fixes
- lighting overhaul
- better water colors and waves
- specular highlights
- cleaned up shader files when toggling options
- minor bugs and perf improvements
- fixed mac support ( sorry :P)
- cloud optimization
- major shader and pipeline reword
- shader settings and menus
- better clouds
- improved fog and reflections
- Major performance improvement
- Water quality improvements
- Shadow improvements
- Added sodium support
- GUI improvements
- updated to pre-3
- performance improvement
- volumetric clouds
- atmospheric fog
- better shadow cascade
- Major improvements to shadow quality
- bloom and lighting improvements
- terrain loading bug fixes
- dynamic vegetation
- NOTE: This version is perf heavy, wait for upcoming patch for improvements
- Improved rendering for terrain
- Added GTAO AO
- Fixed entity shadows
- Revamped settings page
- Performance improvement and bug files
- 26.2-snapshot-3
- shadow rendering performance improvement
- shader settings<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/RV22aFhXyCY" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
- folder support for shaders
- shader switching works (still need to hit reload shader :/)
- player shadows
- Updated to use the new Vulkan graphics API
- built in basic terrain, entity, and water shaders
