🌋 Etna

Golden light for the game's own renderer. A shader mod for Minecraft's native Vulkan renderer.

Part of a family of Italian volcanoes: Etna (shaders) · Vesuvio (performance) · Stromboli (quality of life)

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Etna is a Fabric mod that brings shaders to Minecraft 26.4 snapshots on the game's own Vulkan renderer. It is a single mod: no Iris, no Sodium, no OptiFine, no VulkanMod. Everything it draws goes through the game's own renderer, and with Etna off (F7) the game looks exactly like vanilla. The look aims at warm, natural light: a golden sun over blue shade, soft highlights, never neon.

Made first for Apple Silicon Macs (MoltenVK), and meant to work on Windows and Linux as well.

Status: in development, playable. Each version is tested in game before it ships. Download the latest release · Changelog

Features

Sky and light

• Etna's own sky: blue days, deep orange sunsets, a navy night lit by the moon's phase, a sun disc and twinkling stars. The same sky colours the sunlight, the shade, the clouds, the distance and the water.
• Soft shadows from the sun and the moon that glide as the sun moves, plus shadows of drifting clouds.
• The sun's path leans south (25°, adjustable), so noon shadows have a direction.
• At night: the Milky Way, aurora over cold biomes, shooting stars, a round moon with real phases, and fireflies over the meadows. Rainbows after rain, a sky tinted by each biome, and a violet End sky.

Air

• Light shafts through trees at dawn and dusk, valley mist in the morning and evening, haze in rain.
• Thin rain lit by the sky and by torches, soft snow, distant lights glowing in damp air, and the Nether's own glowing haze over its lava seas.

Surfaces

• Relief and sheen worked out from each block's own texture, so any resource pack works.
• Metals, gems, polished stone, glass and ice each shine their own way; ores glint, flowers glow faintly at night.
• Ground gets wet in rain, puddles form and dry slowly. Leaves glow with the sun behind them.
• Leaves, grass, flowers, crops, kelp and vines sway in gusty wind, bending from their roots.

Light in the dark

• Warm torchlight, a held torch lights your surroundings, lava and lanterns glow.
• Caves are never pitch black, and the Visibility slider makes dark places easier to read without brightening the rest.

Water

• Waves, reflections of the shore and the sky, foam along the shore, sun glints and glitter on the ripples, clear shallows and deep blue depths.
• Under water: fog in the biome's water colour, caustics, light shafts on the sea floor and Snell's window.

Image

• Temporal anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, sharpening, bloom on the brightest things only, a soft tone curve and eye adaptation.
• Four looks: Natural (default), Soft, Vivid and Cinematic.
• Eleven moods on top, each made for a style of resource pack (Faithful, Bare Bones, Mizuno, medieval packs, Sphax, realistic packs) or purely magic: Enchanted, Mystic Twilight, Harvest Autumn, Dreamy Pastel.

Install

1. Install Fabric Loader 0.19.5 or newer and Fabric API for Minecraft 26.4-snapshot-3, with Java 25. Prism Launcher makes this easy.
2. Download etna-shaders-<version>+mc26.4-snapshot-3.jar from Releases and put it in your mods folder.
3. Keep the Graphics API video option on Default or Prefer Vulkan (F3 shows which one is in use).

Settings

Options > Etna Shaders..., and F7 turns Etna on and off in game.

• Quality (Low, Medium, High, Ultra) sets how much work Etna does; Look sets the colours and the mood.
• Mood lays a colour mood over the Look. Pages for Lighting & Shadows, Surfaces, Sky & Air, Sky Wonders, Water, Effects and Colors fine-tune them, each option with a short description. Every change shows in the world right away.
• Settings are saved in config/etna.properties.
• A built-in benchmark times Etna on, off, and with each costly part off in turn, and writes the table to logs/latest.log.

Every setting, explained: docs/settings.md · Performance and how to benchmark: docs/benchmark.md · How Etna works and how to build it: docs/how-it-works.md

Compatibility

• Needs the game's native renderer (Vulkan, or OpenGL). Sodium, Iris, VulkanMod and OptiFine replace that renderer, so they can't run together with Etna.
• Works with Vesuvio and Stromboli, and with resource packs, including ones with their own leaf and plant models.
• Made and tested on Apple Silicon Macs. Windows x64 and Linux are supported but less tested: please open an issue if something looks wrong there.
• Known limits: the Nether and the End keep vanilla's sky, and so do the views under water, in lava, with Blindness or Darkness and in boss fog; the moon is vanilla's. With Improved Transparency on, water seen from above loses its depth colour and Snell's window. A light held in your hand shines through walls.

FAQ

How fast is it? On a Mac mini M4 drawing 1920×1080 pixels with the Ultra preset, Etna 0.7.0 ran at 116 to 120 fps in exclusive fullscreen. Lower presets are faster; Low has no shadows and no anti-aliasing. See docs/benchmark.md.

Is the game really vanilla with Etna off? Yes. Etna replaces none of the game's files: with F7 off it draws with the game's own shaders, textures and models. On a Mac, Half resolution applies only when Etna is on as the game starts.

Why isn't it on Modrinth or CurseForge? A few parts come from Photon Shaders, whose licence doesn't allow those sites without its author's permission. Releases are here on GitHub.

Something looks wrong. Press F7: if it goes away, it's Etna. Note where and when it happens (time of day, near or far, which blocks) and open an issue, with a screenshot if you can.

Do I need Vesuvio? No. Etna works on its own; Vesuvio makes the game, and Etna's shadows, faster.

Credits and licence

Etna's own code is under the MIT licence, see LICENSE. Its terrain and cloud shaders are based on Minecraft's vanilla shaders (© Mojang AB), which Etna's licence doesn't cover. A few small parts are ported from Photon Shaders by SixthSurge (temporal anti-aliasing, shadow map distortion, the water's Fresnel function) and stay under the Photon Shaders License (LICENSE-PHOTON.txt). Complementary Reimagined inspired the look; none of its code is used. Everything taken from other projects and every technique Etna follows is listed in CREDITS.md.