Minecraft Bedrock Edition now has official shader support

Bedrock players, rejoice! Minecraft has just announced the official shader support for the Bedrock edition of Minecraft along with the Console editions, Android, and Windows PC editions. For those unaware of Shaders, it is a modification that adds realistic lighting, shadows, reflections, and other effects to the game’s graphics giving it an immersive feel and realism.

Here's everything you need to know about shader support in Bedrock.

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Minecraft Bedrock Team x Render Dragon brings shader support

The Java Edition of Minecraft, because of its code and modding compatibility, is blessed with such mods and addons where players could enjoy the game with various tweaks. The shaders were the feature that was majorly missing from the Bedrock edition even with all the parity updates.

But now Mojang is partnered with the Render Dragon team to improve the graphics of the game and make it more beautiful. Render Dragon is a powerful and flexible engine that can handle complex graphics and effects on various devices. Render Dragon also enables other new features for the Bedrock Edition, such as ray tracing and improved lighting.

Currently, this feature is experimental and only available in previews and betas, which players can sign up for from the official Mojang page.

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Features of the first preview

Bedrock with official shaders support (Image via Twitter)

To achieve this, the Bedrock team used the Ray tracing format for the Physically Based Rendering (PBR) material format. They are applying this PBR to various blocks and entities, which would, in return, help the lighting to be deferred. Because of this, PBR is applied directly on blocks and entities, it is designed to work across mobile, console as well as PC with the promise of further enhancement in performance and quality.

According to Mojang, the first technical preview includes the following:

• PBR materials - blocks and entities
• The primary source of light ( sun and moon)
• Bloom and Shadows
• Tone mapping

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How to play the shaders-enabled Minecraft Bedrock?

There isn't a minimum requirement of specification of machines for PC and Android like Java Edition, so it all depends on how strong your system is and the performance will differ, but Mojang has promised to keep working on technical stuff where they will be monitoring and improving it with all the feedback.

The technical preview is available now in Bedrock Preview, and Beta builds for Windows, Android, and Consoles. Head to Minecraft's official site to join the program and help develop the feature with valuable feedback.