What Happened to Shaders in Minecraft Bedrock? Will We See Them Return to Playstation, Xbox, & PE?

One of the most common questions I see in my YouTube comments is how do I get shaders for Minecraft on my Xbox and the short answer to this question is no there is currently no possible way to get actual shaders on any Minecraft Xbox console furthermore if you’re on

Playstation switch or mobile well you’re also out of luck and if you’re playing the Windows 10 edition of the game without an RTX series graphics card well that’s also unfortunate as you don’t have access to shaders either so why is this the case with the launch of the

Next gen consoles a few years ago in particular the new Xbox series Microsoft tees the power of the new console’s ability to support Ray tracing by sharing screenshots showing how this feature could completely change the way we view Minecraft and believe it or not there was a time when custom shaders

Were supported on any bedrock console Xbox Playstation Mobile switch and any Windows 10 user but times have changed today I hope to answer the question that so many have asked before what happened to Minecraft Bedrock shaders why does my console show the enable Ray tracing

Button but not allow me to turn it on well here’s all you need to know in order to understand why custom shaders no longer work on Bedrock we need to locate the beginning of our story and today our Story begins at the update that effectively broke custom shaders Minecraft Beta

1.13.0.13 released all the way back in September of 2019. with this update for Xbox Windows and Android we saw many General bug fixes for mobs performance and commands but the most noticeable change came to the Xbox console saying Xbox one now uses the new rendering engine render dragon and since this

Update my friends no custom shaders have been able to work on any Xbox to this day as the Xbox console was the first victim of what we’ll call the render Dragon update so what is render Dragon here’s how Microsoft describes it render Dragon was developed by the Mojang

Studios Graphics team to give our game greater performance stability and flexibility the new architecture of render Dragon enables our developers to bring new graphics features such as physically based rendering PBR and Ray tracing to the game so render Dragon to sum it up is the new graphics engine for

Minecraft Bedrock added to support things like Ray tracing Visual and performance upgrades and all of that sounds great but why did this update break my Shader on Minecraft Xbox the simple answer is that this update removed support for all custom shaders within the game this was stated in the

Render Dragon FAQ currently render Dragon does not support third-party Community shaders any Community shaders previously used on Minecraft for Windows may not run on a render Dragon version of the game and the community was absolutely appalled at this update and they weren’t afraid to show it as what

Seems to happen very often these days a big update is pushed out by developers and the community response by asking if some things can be changed well here’s what we need changed render dragons shaders currently come pre-compiled so for third-party shaders to become possible we would need Mojang to share

Their compiler or workflow Not only would it be great for this to be made available but for Mojang to actively develop and promote ways for third-party creators to make the game more customized and more beautiful for everyone and that’s what we didn’t get the update had come out and to this day

No shaders are available on any Xbox but that’s Xbox what about the other devices well unfortunately they all faced a very similar fate as time went on render Dragon was pushed out to all Bedrock platforms the PlayStation then the Windows 10 Edition after that came the fall of the mobile devices and most

Recently the Nintendo switch even the education Edition had render Dragon enabled in the 1.18.31 version so we get it basically every version of the game no longer supports custom shaders but is there any hope left that will see shaders someday make a return to Minecraft Bedrock Edition the answer to

This question I think is yes there is hope but only if you have the right kind of console let me explain currently the only place you could activate Ray tracing and use custom shaders on Bedrock is the Windows 10 Edition but there is a catch only if your computer

Has the appropriate specs you see Ray tracing is a very demanding technology here’s how it works Ray tracing is used to render Graphics in a way that bounces light off in-game objects unlike the guesswork technology of the past Ray tracing works on its own performing all light functions in real time this of

Course is very Hardware demanding so what specs do you need on your computer for Ray tracing to work well let’s just say it’s not cheap first off you need a capable GPU like an Nvidia GeForce RTX 20 series and higher or an AMD Radeon RX 6000 series and higher along with all

These other specs you have to meet but basically what this means is if you don’t have a one thousand dollar computer at least in your hands you won’t be able to run shaders on computer ever so unfortunately I think you’ll have to give up on your dreams if you

Don’t meet these specs as Microsoft has made it clear it won’t work in terms of other consoles if you’re on PlayStation 4 or Xbox One I also think your dreams of seeing real shaders returning are crushed I’m predicting they will never be supported on these consoles ever

Again as they are truly some old devices now and the specs are just not there furthermore I don’t know much about the Nintendo switch I’ve seen some places say the Nintendo switch 2 will support Ray tracing but until then I think the Nintendo switch also has a dark future

When it comes to shaders to add even more bad news if you play Minecraft on the Pocket Edition Apple or Android I also believe your dreams of scene shaders someday are crushed as of now you see Ray tracing requires extremely strong modern graphics and smartphone and tablet technology are still a ways

Away from being there years at least so my apologies to anyone on the PS4 Xbox One Pocket Edition switch and those who don’t have an Nvidia graphics card in their PC I’m just going to be straight up with you all and say I don’t think you’ll ever see real shaders again in

Your Minecraft game don’t kill me I am just the messenger I will let you all know there are texture packs out there that will give you things like a realistic Sky realistic blocks and moving leaves but you’ll never see casted Shadows or anything like that if

You guys are an Xbox and need help getting these fake shaders or mods even I can help you out my Discord server the Shameless plug there feel free join that if you need help with add-ons I got you there nevertheless throughout this video there are two consoles I haven’t

Mentioned a whole lot the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox series consoles these are the consoles where I see the most potential for future Ray tracing support to be added that is our current issue these consoles can support Ray tracing but they are basically running an old version of Minecraft the Xbox One and

PS4 versions of Minecraft that don’t have support for Ray tracing yet so until we see Microsoft release a new version of the game specifically for these consoles we won’t ever see support for shaders this is interesting as remember over two years ago we were teased by Microsoft when they showed

Shader support on the Xbox series X console furthermore on the render Dragon FAQ page this question made an appearance is Minecraft with Ray tracing coming to Next Generation consoles to which the answer from Microsoft was we do not have any news to share currently for future updates follow the news on

Minecraft.net okay honestly on this whole situation they’ve pretty much opted to play the silent game and barely give us any information which just leaves us with more questions at the end of the day anyway here is a very interesting story that happened recently in regards to this topic we have video

Proof of a person using Ray tracing capabilities on their Xbox series X on March 28th of this year Twitter user Tom Warren posted this Minecraft with Ray tracing on Xbox the latest Minecraft preview is optimized for the Xbox series s or X and has early Ray tracing support

And with this tweet he also attached a video of him showcasing the ray tracing so how did he do this well what he did was first join the Xbox insiders program which is open to any Xbox user you just have to enter in the app name in the

Microsoft store and then join the program once he joined the program he was given access to a special version of Minecraft called the Minecraft preview once he installed this version of the game he joined a friend who was hosting a world on a computer with a Shader pack

Activated as he joined his friend he was opted to download the pack and once loaded in he activated the ray tracing button in the settings and boom Ray tracing shaders working on Xbox series X in March of 2022. this proved Microsoft was working on implementing a new Ray tracing supported version of Minecraft

On the new consoles but unfortunately this story has a sad ending once the Twitter clip got popularity Minecraft noticed it and tweeted this out the previous Minecraft preview build available to Xbox insiders inadvertently included prototype code for Ray tracing support on Xbox consoles this early prototype code has been removed from

Preview and doesn’t signal near future plans to bring Ray tracing support to consoles so basically once Minecraft noticed that Xboxes could support Ray tracing They removed it from the Minecraft preview version and we were back where we started with no Ray tracing support on the next gen Xboxes

And that’s pretty much where we are today waiting to sum up the whole story once again third-party shaders no longer work because the new render engine render Dragon doesn’t support them if you are on any old gen console or mobile I don’t think you’ll ever be able to

Have shaders again however there are some texture packs for you that make stuff look somewhat realistic if you’re on the Windows 10 edition of the game you can use Ray tracing features if you have the right specs but that’s pretty expensive I’m hopeful for the future of

The Xbox series consoles and the PS5 as those consoles can support Ray tracing we just need Microsoft to create a new version of Minecraft for these consoles we’ve already seen them working on this on the Xbox and if it is supported on the Xbox I think it’s fair to see it

Also come to the PS5 it could be in the form of like a ray tracing pack released in the Minecraft Marketplace or something just some way to get shaders please Microsoft is showing signs of testing Ray tracing on the new gen consoles but overall they’re playing the

Quiet game and not giving us much information this is where we are today it’s not looking good for many of us but if you have an x-gen console or a buff PC your future is promising I’ll keep you all up to date if we get more news regarding

This topic I did my best to research today and if anything is off let me know in the comments down below I’ll put links in the description to all the articles I used if you want to read them yourselves but anyways I appreciate you all for watching until the next one have

A great answer to everyone it’s been Smitty peace out