10 best Minecraft shaders you shouldn't miss in 2022

Minecraft has one of the most iconic visual designs in all of gaming. However, given that the game is more than a decade old, and much older than even that if one considers the beta and alpha versions.

Players have had time to put thousands of hours into the game, and in that much time the generic look can become quite bland, and players might want to change things up.

There are resource packs that change the texture of the blocks, but more versatile are the game’s shaders. These are community-made graphical changes that can enhance the game’s vanilla look, or completely overhaul the game’s graphics to take the visuals to another level entirely.

For the sake of easy comparison between the shaders, roughly the same landscape will be shown using each shader.

---

10 best shaders that Minecraft players should try out

1) SEUS

A coastal village with the SEUS shader (Image via Minecraft)

SEUS is short for Sonic Ethers’ Unbelievable Shaders, one of the longest-lived shaders the game has ever seen.

It is a classic example of shaders that manage to balance perfectly on the tightrope of how the game feels with how it looks. While some shaders look great, they can stop the game feeling like Minecraft. SEUS looks great and retains the game's vibe. It is also a base for many other shaders, making it vital to shaders as the community knows them.

The only potential downside to this shader is that the bright blocks are very bright and can be a bit hard to look at. This becomes more jarring when there are a lot of them, especially when combined with the extra vibrancy added to the game's colors by this shader.

---

2) Sildur’s Vibrant Shaders

A coastal village with the Sildur's Vibrant shader (Image via Minecraft)

This shader goes hand in hand with SEUS, as it is another old shader that is well-known in the community. This age comes with some boons, however, as the shader is regularly updated by a committed team. There are also versions of the shader made for machines with less than stellar hardware.

The visuals of the water in this shader are quite unique as they make the water almost entirely opaque. Most shaders tend to make the water quite transparent, in order to demonstrate their ability to render refractions and reflections.

However, this shader relies on its ability to render beautiful waves and surface reflections to sell its realism.

---

3) Lagless Shaders

A coastal village with the Lagless shader (Image via Minecraft)

One of the best shaders for players on middling or aging systems is the Lagless Shader, though there is no shortage of shaders for lower-end systems. This shader is relatively simple but increases the vibrancy of the game’s colors and visual fidelity of the textures.

The idea of this shader is to improve the look of the game rather than change the entire look of the game, and it succeeds at this incredibly so. The only potential downside for this shader when compared to some others is that the game seems much darker than it normally does.

---

4) Naelego’s Cel Shaders

A coastal village with Naelego's Cel-Shade shader (Image via Minecraft)

One of the most unique shaders available to the game’s community, this shader adds cel-shading to the entire game, in a style made famous by games such as Borderlands, yet reminiscent of classics comics and cartoons.

However, this shader is not very optimized and will take a heavy toll on the impact of the game’s performance for any players on systems without the beefiest components.

---

5) Nostalgia Shader

A coastal village with the Nostalgia shader (Image via Minecraft)

This shader is a callback to the origin of shaders as a whole. The idea is to mimic the look shaders had nearly a decade ago when shaders were their own type of mod, and not yet added to things like optifine.

This means the colors, lighting, and shadows are softer than most modern shaders, which really emphasizes stark contrasts and sharp images. This softer design also makes the shader easier on the eyes.

While this shader will, by definition, only appeal to players who experienced the early shaders, there is nothing quite like it for players wanting to experience the origins of the game.

---

6) Oceano

A coastal village with the Oceano shader (Image via Minecraft)

This shader hyperfocuses on one aspect of the game’s visuals. That being the oceans found all throughout the game’s worlds.

While there is no shortage of shaders that attempt to insert photorealistic water, Oceano takes this concept to another level with oceans so mindbogglingly beautiful that players will want to have all of their builds on the coast, just to see it as much as possible.

The shader also does not skimp on the rest of the visuals, enhancing the game’s lighting and color vibrancy.

---

7) KUDA Shaders

A coastal village with the KUDA shader (Image via Minecraft)

KUDA is another very well-known shader in the community. The changes made to the game are much more subtle than other shaders, with simple vibrancy changes and additional depth of shadows. The water reflections are good, but nothing amazing by shader standards.

However, where KUDA shines is in the skies, which no other shader can compete with. The skies in KUDA have breathtaking clouds and completely overhaul the game’s atmosphere, literally and metaphorically.

---

8) Continuum Shaders

A coastal village with the Continuum shader (Image via Minecraft)

Continuum Shaders is very similar to an upcoming shader on the list in that it tries to offer a comprehensive experience. There is almost everything that players could want: moving leaves, waving oceans, godrays, and real-time light renderings just to name a few. This will impact performance, just like all high-feature shaders will.

The softer lighting is also pleasant on the eyes and emphasize's the game's chill nature.

---

9) ProjectLuma

A coastal village with the ProjectLuma shader (Image via Minecraft)

This shader is very similar to the well-known KUDA-Shaders for one reason: ProjectLuma is the official successor to KUDA, recoded from the ground up.

ProjectLuma is an interesting shader as it is attempting to be both a graphical overhaul as well as a performance shader, and, thankfully, it succeeds at this. The game looks incredible, with crystal clear water and beautiful light rays and skies. While using this shader the performance does not take much of a hit at all.

---

10) Too Many Effects

A coastal village with the Too Many Effects shader (Image via Minecraft)

As the name implies, this shader has one goal: add effects to the game past the point of sanity. There is lens flair so intense that the flair has flair.

This shader markets itself as a shader pack with everything players could want crammed into a single, resource-intensive, framerate-destroying pack. Everything players might want can be found in this shader: lens flairs, godrays, water reflections, shaking trees, and much more.