5 Best shaders to use with Minecraft Distant Horizons mod

Minecraft fans were astonished by the recent news that the popular Distant Horizons mod, which uses level of detail (LOD) techniques to render faraway scenery without heavily impacting performance, gained shader support. This has resulted in players improving their graphical quality at long distances without worrying about the performance hit from increasing in-game render distance.

Although Distant Horizons has gained shader support, only certain Minecraft shader packs are currently supported. Certain shaders seem to still have trouble rendering the LOD detailing at a distance, as expected, but there are still plenty of great shaders that work well with this mod. Since this is the case, it doesn't hurt to examine some of the best shaders for Distant Horizons.

Note: This article is subjective and based on the author's opinions.

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5 of the best Minecraft shaders for the Distant Horizons mod

1) Reflective Vanilla Shaders

This Minecraft shader adds nice reflections without a major performance impact (Image via Mojang Studios || Rin/Modrinth)

For a vanilla-styled Minecraft shader with a few graphical improvements of its own, Vanilla Reflective Shaders might be worth a look. These shaders keep the core visuals intact and instead add reflections, including those from the sky, screen-space reflections, water transparency and reflection based on the camera angle, and physically based rendering (PBR) support for specular highlights.

Since this shader pack doesn't introduce a ton of post-processing effects, it's relatively light on a player's CPU/GPU and still adds some nice reflective qualities to Minecraft's default textures.

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2) BSL Shaders

BSL Shaders remains one of Minecraft's most popular (Image via Mojang Studios || BITSLABLAB)

One of Minecraft's most popular shader packs to this day, BSL Shaders are highly customizable to fit a wide range of player hardware and use volumetric lighting, bloom, ambient occlusion, and real-time shadow rendering to create a pleasant and inviting atmosphere. BSL also has a collection of settings to add interesting effects like cel shading and motion blur.

If players want a more realistic take on in-game visuals when using the Distant Horizons mod, they may want to give BSL Shaders a shot. Some of the vistas created by combining the mod and shader pack can be breathtaking to behold.

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3) Potato Shader

These shaders are great for lower-spec hardware setups (Image via Mojang Studios || RRe36/CurseForge)

If fans are worried about losing FPS due to installing shaders, they may want to give Potato Shader a try. This shader pack introduces many of the upsides of its counterparts, including tone mapping, depth of field, motion blur, anti-aliasing, and custom water, but in a way that focuses on providing the lowest possible performance impact.

Potato Shader can run on just about any type of PC hardware for Minecraft. If players are running it well alongside Distant Horizons, they can start to work their way up to more graphically demanding shader packs.

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4) Complementary Shaders Fork by EminGT (Edited by Steveplays28)

This programming fork allows the popular Complementary Shaders to be compatible with Distant Horizons (Image via Complementary.dev)

Due to constraints with the Distant Horizons mod, simply installing Complementary Shaders doesn’t quite work as intended for Minecraft players. Fortunately, a fork of the popular shader pack was created by EminGT and further edited by Steveplays28 to allow for Distant Horizons compatibility. It takes a little more effort to find and download, but fans can’t argue with the results, thanks to the fantastic post-processing that Complementary provides.

Being highly customizable for a wide range of hardware, Complementary can work well with most PCs. Nearly every block in the game has custom lighting and post-processing effects, and the realistic water and reflection effects can see players gettiing lost while gazing on the lakefront or the shoreline. They can even choose between realistic clouds or a blockier style that fits Minecraft’s aesthetic, and countless other settings provide fine-tuned graphical control.

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5) Rethinking Voxels

This fork allows Minecraft players to use Rethinking Voxels with Distant Horizons (Image via Mojang Studios || Gri573/Modrinth

Much like the previous entry on this list, this shader is a forked version of the popular Rethinking Voxels pack to be made compatible with Distant Horizons thanks to the efforts of EminGT and Steveplays28. Rethinking Voxels is technically an offshoot of Complementary Shaders but has more than enough uniqueness to stand apart from its parent shader.

Rethinking Voxels offers gorgeous visuals, including colored block light, sharp shadow rendering, as well as path tracing. Each block offers its own light projection, which can drastically alter the mood of the lighting based on the surrounding blocks and the overall atmosphere. However, there may be a performance impact for Rethinking Voxels on some lower-spec machines.

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Finally, these shader compatibilities are still in early development and technical issues may occur. Moreover, if players are using Iris Shaders with the shaders listed above, they’ll need to be running Iris version 1.6.11 - 1.6.17. Many shaders should be made compatible when Iris 1.7.0 is made available, but for now, players may want to check the official Github documentation to make sure they’re using the compatible mods and shader versions for Distant Horizons.