Good Morning Friends! I spent most of my evening playing Destiny, but for a little bit in the early evening I resolved to get something working that I had thought about for awhile. I do not have an RTX series graphics card and as a result I cannot play Minecraft RTX. That said my preference is the Java Client and I don’t believe the RTX shaders work for that anyway. However there are a number of community supported shader packs that provide a very similar experience. I’ve installed this sort of thing before in the past and form what I understood it was a much simpler process these days. As a result I sat down and sorted it out, and the results are phenomenally cool. I thought this morning I would share the process.
This entire adventure begins with a little utility known as Optifine. I’ve been using this for years because it greatly expands the graphical options available to Minecraft and tweaks the way that textures are applied to the blocks. For example instead of rendering glass as a bunch of individual panes, it will instead render an entire wall of glass blocks as a single seamless mass of glass. Essentially this is a JAR file that once double clicked acts as a guided installer much like that of a standard Windows wizard installer. It is going to attempt to find your Minecraft folder, which in theory should be auto populated but if not type %AppData% in the windows run prompt and double click the .Minecraft folder and then copy that entire path and paste it into the Optifine installer.
Once this has been installed successfully you should see a new profile show up in your Minecraft Launcher. For example I have three in my drop down, Optifine for 1.16.5, the latest release which will always update to the most current client, and then an older legacy edition of Forge 1.14.4 which is a similar mod manager. If you want to use Optifine or any of the shader options, then you will need to launch Minecraft under this profile. In theory it shouldn’t negatively impact any of your existing saved games but there will always be the little caution icon indicating you are playing a modified version of Minecraft from that point forward.
Next we will need to grab the Nostalgia shader, which for sake of this discussion is the RTX replacement we are going to go with. Thing is there are a bunch of different Optifine compatible shaders and if you are curious about other options check out this Rock Paper Shotgun article. I personally went with Nostalgia because it is reported to have a minimal hit to performance. Some of the shader packs will cause a dip in performance and given that the Java client already performs worse than Bedrock aka the C# client… I didn’t want to take a lot of chances. Ultimately this time you are going to download the shader zip file and hold onto it for a few minutes because you are going to drag it into a specific folder shortly.
Now you are going to launch Minecraft and make sure you have selected the Optifine profile. From there you need get into game, hit escape, choose options, choose video settings and now finally choose shaders. You should be staring at a screen that looks very similar to the one in the above screenshot. From here click the Shaders Folder button, and this is going to pop open the folder where Optifine is expecting shaders to be stored. Copy the zip you downloaded from the Nostalgia website into this folder and within a few moments it should show up in the list of selectable shaders. Select it, click done and you should now have Nostalgia shaders installed and impacting your game visuals.
The difference in how the game looks is not subtle. The world becomes significantly darker, but the lighting effects become more meaningful. You can see that were are getting realistic looking water reflections on this screenshot taken from the dock on the back of my multiplayer realms base. Additionally as I have placed torches around the perimeter, you see them all casting their own halo of light.
Similarly look around the torches in this screenshot, you can see the rain that was pouring down being illuminated in a somewhat natural manner. The game still feels like Minecraft since I have not done anything to tweak the block skins, but it feels like a more naturalistic view of the same game.
Things got really trippy when I went down into Grace’s undersea base area because we were getting block a reflection from the surface of the glass as well as a ghosting reflection from the water.
The transition between water and land represented by her waterfall entrance to the ocean from the sea base ends up looking like a portal to another world. This was taken from me standing on the sea floor staring back into the base.
This however is looking the other direction out into the ocean floor… as some of the underwater plants are now apparently flagged for bioluminescence. The ocean in general because a much more dark and foreboding place.
Finally we have the Nether which also becomes significantly more dangerous because everything is much darker. It would be SUPER easy to walk off the edge of a cliff and fall into a morass of lava in this version. I do really like the way that the lava has a glow to it however.
This mornings post is largely just show and tell and explanation of how to get to the same point yourself if you are so inclined. I’ve used these sorts of shaders before, but the install process was considerably more tedious. I already had optifine installed, so for me personally it was just a case of clicking on the folder and dragging the zip file into place. I am probably going to experiment some with other shader packs to decide which one I like the best. I do really like the warm glow that Nostalgia has.
Most of the screenshots I have included were of night time, because that is when the difference is the most dramatic. Daytime however looks very solid as well and gives you a sort of depth of field experience fuzzing out the far distance and giving you more naturalistic shadows. The one thing of note is with these sorts of shaders it becomes a bit harder to tell if something is sufficiently lit. When I am running this sort of shader I often times pop open the debug menu with F3 so I can check the actual lighting levels for the purposes of spawning monsters. I honestly think the part that I enjoy the most are the more smooth clouds, because Minecraft clouds have always bothered me.
Whelp folks that is it. I just wanted to explain how one gets shaders in Minecraft these days and that it is much easier than it used to be. On that note going to close the post and get on with my morning.