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Shaders are one of the best ways for Minecraft Java players to enhance the visuals of the game. They are third-party rewrites of the game's lighting and rendering engine. You can use Minecraft shaders to add huge visual enhancements like real-time lighting and shadows, water reflections, fluffy clouds, and realistic, waving bodies of water. There are plentiful options for shaders already updated to 1.21.
10 of the best-looking shaders currently available to players as of 2024 can be found detailed below, along with what makes them so pretty.
10 of the most beautiful shaders for Minecraft in 2024
1) BSL Shaders
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BSL Shaders is by far the most popular shader out there, and for good reason. It's absolutely stunning and adds real-time shadows, volumetric lighting, ambient occlusion, bloom, and customizable clouds and water. Players can further enhance and customize the shader's depth of field, motion blur, celshading, and even world curvature.
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This is an almost unprecedented level of control over the game's visuals. It is perfect for players who don't mind tinkering with Minecraft settings, as it can be made truly stunning with a bit of time and effort.
2) Complementary Shaders
There are two different versions of Complementary Shaders available to players: Unbound and Reimagined. These are two presets of the same shader, which is why they share a spot on this list. Reimagined is the simpler of the two, focused on smaller changes to the game's visuals that won't have a large impact on performance, such as water reflections.
Unbound is the other version of Complementary Shaders and is aimed at those looking for a more realistic experience. Water looks better and clouds are much fluffier.
3) Sildur's Vibrant Shaders
Sildur's Vibrant Shaders, which has a history dating all the way back to 2012, aims to add everything that players associate with shaders—volumetric lighting, bloom, ambient occlusion, and reflections—to the game without tanking performance. And it succeeds at this goal, being one of the best-looking shaders out there while also not lowering Minecraft's FPS.
4) Pastel Shaders
Pastel Shaders is a stylistic shader pack that adds several differently colored shader presets to pick from. Players can pick a pink, blue, or yellow preset, all based on different Minecraft axolotl colors, which will drastically change how the world looks. While much of what this shader does is quite standard, the night sky is particularly gorgeous, which further helps it stand out.
5) Beyond Belief Shaders
Beyond Belief Shaders is one of the oldest Minecraft shaders still being worked on, having started development all the way back in 2015. As the name suggests, this shader pack intends to make the game look almost better than can be believed. It does this by adding features such as wet reflections on the ground after rain, volumetric clouds, motion blur, improved water, and waving leaves on Minecraft trees.
6) Nostalgia Shader
Nostalgia Shader, as the name suggests, intends to replicate the style of older, first-generation shaders such as SEUS v08 and Chocapic v3, which cannot otherwise be used in recent major Minecraft updates. It's hard to describe just what makes these older shaders different, but they truly offer a unique experience, which is what makes Nostalgia Shader so gorgeous.
7) Vanilla Plus Shader
Vanilla Plus Shader is a simple shader pack that aims to add minor visual enhancements, like dynamic shadows, better clouds, godrays, and bloom, to the base game. However, what makes Vanilla Plus Shader really worth considering is that it comes loaded with different presets aimed at replicating older Minecraft shaders that no longer work, such as SEUS v08 and Chocapic v3.
8) Sildur's Enhanced Default
Sildur's Enhanced Default, by SildurFX, is, as the name suggests, another vanilla plus shader that aims to enhance the base game rather than change it. It adds shadows, reflections, TAA, real-time lighting, and even godrays to the game without otherwise changing how anything looks. There is also a fast preset for those needing to maximize Minecraft's FPS.
9) Super Duper Vanilla Shaders
The Super Duper Vanilla Shaders back draws inspiration from the canceled graphics upgrade that was announced for Bedrock back in 2017. This upgrade was given the name "Super Duper Graphics Pack," hence the name of the shader.
This is perhaps the best vanilla shader available to players. It aims to push the game's base look as far as it can go by adding lens flares, realistic water, real-time reflections, and more. Everything about the changes feels incredibly vanilla and familiar, but they are unique enough to stand out.
10) Spooklementary
Spooklementary is one of the most visually unique of all the shaders available. It aims to totally change the atmosphere of the game by desaturating most colors and making the lighting much moodier. Additionally, eyes will randomly appear in darkness, and the fog is much heavier than normal, making Minecraft downright scary with this shader.
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