Are Shaders Without Mods Possible?

When Mojang announced that the planned caves and cliffs update was too ambitious, and would be split into two parts, many people were disappointed. The first part, 1.17, contains neither caves, nor cliffs. Incredible. We got a liiitel taste of things to come, with

Axolotls, glow squids, goats, and some really nice building blocks (seriously, good stuff Mojang). In the grand scheme of things, this actually wasn’t a small update at all. Minecraft 1.6’s main additions, for example, were horses (ok), and hardened clay. That was the

Update! You got one highly requested mob, 5 pretty good building blocks, and now lapis lazuli looks like garbage! But ok, our last update was the nether update! The biggest and bestest update in Minecraft history!!! Well guess what. I’m here to tell you that the most exciting change to come to Minecraft

In years arrived in 1.17 and went completely under the radar. The biggest technical changes since 1.13 and the addition of datapacks, that’s right, we’re talking about: S H A D E R S *stupid voice* But, Legitimoose! OptiFine has had shaders for- SHUT- *stupid voice* and hasn’t Minecraft had LET ME FINISH-

Shaders since 1.8 with super secret settings, and when you spectate certain mobs? S H A D E R S IN RESOURCE PACKS. That’s right, you can download a resource pack, slap it in your game, and completely change minecraft’s rendering, all without

Installing a single mod. You can bundle them into adventure maps to get amazing new effects, servers can have you install shaders that completely change how the game feels! Wait, you can? I have a theory for why no one seems excited about this. It’s because nobody knows what it means!

>>>I actually don’t know too much about… this. >>> -a whole new render- like- pipeline? >>> I don’t really know what this means. >>> I am not going to even pretend like I understand the all of the ramifications of that… Just because I don’t. So what can you do with these new, buffed shaders?

The big new change is that you can modify vertices. (*muffled* what???) The corners of the cube. You can move them. This means you can now: Bend the world into a sphere! View the game in 2D! Make water wave! Make everything wave!! Mmmmm, Monke.

You can also calculate what color each pixel on the screen should be, based off things like where the pixel is on screen, and what textures those pixels should come from. This lets you do things such as… Rainbow selection thingy! I made this one 🙂 Color grading effects. Custom skyboxes! (Finally!) Animated skyboxes!

Texture swapping! VERY ADVANCED texture swapping! … How the- Now, before you get the wrong idea, these aren’t powerful enough yet for things like shadows, realistic reflection, or path traced graphics. We can’t do what you can do with OptiFine shaders OH WAIT YES YOU CAN WHAT THE FRICK, HOW? HOW?!?!?

This shader- sorry, this RESOURCE PACK is still in the tech demo phase, and is extremely buggy. In fact, it creates some of the coolest glitches I’ve ever seen. It is also, very, VERY laggy on the default settings, and changing the settings is not

Exactly a walk in the sunflower plains biome. My mind can barely comprehend that this is somehow running in vanilla Minecraft, in real time. Who needs RTX On when you’ve got Bálint On. I don’t know how this works, but it seems

To use the actual screen as a list of blocks in the world. Then there’s an entire new rendering engine that reads the screen, and then draws the actual output that you see on top? I could be wrong, but that would explain why whenever an entity is on screen, random blocks appear

In the sky. It would be reading the actual pixels of the mob as if it were block data. This would also explain the fact that making your resolution too small makes it freak out a fair bit. Honestly these bugs are so cool looking, they make me wanna film a… glitchpunk

Music video or something. So, how can you start using shaders yourself? Before you begin, you must first know what a shader is. And before that, you must like and subscribe. … C’mon now. In your computer there are two wolves, one

Of them is full of numbers, the other is full of numbers. Your computer is full of numbers. One wolf, your processor is very good at running basically anything you throw at it, as long as the thing you’re throwing is a computer program. The other wolf is in a worldwide

Shortage, and costs one to two thousand dollars above the manufacturers suggested retail price. I am talking of course, about your graphics card. This baby is fast as FRICK, but it only gets that speed from ridiculous amounts of optimizations that make it very fast at graphics

Related math. That makes it very hard to write code for it. That difficult to write code often comes in the form of… a shader. A lot of shaders are gonna require advanced college level math, that I will gladly be

The first to say, I am unqualified to teach. What I am qualified to teach, is how to have fun with it, even if you aren’t a master of… -whatever this is. Minecraft shaders are written in a language

Called GLSL, or Graphics Library Shading Language. It’s a lot like C, but with a bunch of extra graphics related features built into the base language. It’s not an easy language, but it’s not exactly hard if you’ve programmed before. There’s lots of tutorials for it here on YouTube.

Most are not explicitly Minecraft related, but that’s completely fine. You’ll want to know the basics of GLSL before you even open Minecraft. Especially swizzling. You should definitely learn about swizzling. It’s extremely cool. Ok, now that you’ve done that important step and definitely haven’t skipped it to

Get to the interesting part, the interesting part: Minecraft shaders are… weird. Very weird. The best thing you can do early on is to modify other peoples code. This stuff was released as an “experimental feature” and has absolutely no official documentation. Everything people have figured out, they’ve learned through

Trial and error. We’re still in the early days of vanilla shaders, so the #1 resource for learning them is the shaders themselves. Pop open a basic shader and try to figure out what it does. Change one or two lines of code! Try and figure out what each part

Is doing. If you haven’t done math up to algebra and trigonometry yet, there might be some stuff you just won’t get, but don’t worry about it. If you can get literally anything to work, you’re already doing better than most people.

Ok, but jumping straight from basic coding tutorials to reading peoples code is hard. Fortunately, the community has already started making guides and resources about this awesome new feature. The best place I’m currently aware of for shader info is the Minecraft

Commands Discord server. Before you go pinging the shaders role though, just do a quick search for “shaders” in the server. You’ll find people linking to explanations of the basics, and discussing cool stuff they’ve made. Not gonna lie I’ve spent several hours

Just scrolling through shader stuff in this server, and every time I feel like I learn something new. This endorsement comes from the heart, and also from the fact that I’m really not that good at shaders please, no I can’t debug your GLSL code- error code

69? No I’ve never encountered that, please I- AaAaAaAaAaAHhHhH! In conclusion: Give shaders a chance! If you’re a noob, test out some of the awesome resource packs people are making and spread the good word! If you’re a big nerd …👀 modify other people’s code, and search through the command discord for information.

And next time your friends are dissin’ 1.17, send them this sick custom sky resource pack, or send them this video (hehe!) Click on THIS fantastic video for some more excellent content. I’m not sure what video I’ll pick to go here but I’m sure it’s FAN-TASTIC. That’s right, I one hundred percent endorse

Whatever is on screen right now. Oh god… Do Not Click That Video, it’s not mine, I don’t know who made it and I don’t know how it got onto my channel, just watch the first video don’t- no! You stop that! Don’t you- Heyyyy- I’m gonna end the video before you can-