Photon Shaders

October 19, 2026

This update contains lots of improvements and fixes made by the community!
- Added support for Photonics (by Essentuan)
- Added support for Colorwheel (by xuanplus and djefrey)
- Added more settings for atmosphere saturation, blocky clouds, vanilla AO and colored lights vanilla lightmap contribution (by PatataNL)
- Added Korean translation (by shihyeon)
- Added vertical cutoff to border fog (by Candymanmax)
- Added simplylights blocks to Colored Lights (by rockett1)
- Many misc. bug fixes by:
- Lassebq
- rrtt2217
- 3DpCode
- yqs112358
- jspaterson000
- IMS
- Improved bloom upsampling
- Fixed some MC 26.3 rendering

April 14, 2026

Fix a mistake in the previous fix that was causing incorrect behaviour on 1.21.11

April 13, 2026

This is a tiny hotfix update which removes the "Use Separate Entity Draws" option and instead uses the recommended value for this setting based on the Minecraft version

April 11, 2026

- Added support for Voxy
- Added screen-space shadows and subsurface-scattering for distant terrain
- Added material support for new Minecraft additions - thanks to Candymanmax
- Improved the sun and moon, with thanks to Xyber
- Lots of bug fixes, with special thanks to Lassebq and rrtt217

Huge thanks to the community members who contributed to this release:
- Candymanmax
- Lassebq
- rrtt217
- Xyber
- Fooze
- Miclus
- Swung0x08
- PatataNL
- JXDYJS

June 29, 2025

This is a small update fixing a few issues that were found in v1.2.

June 25, 2025

Hi everyone,

Despite my extremely sporadic work schedule for this project, it's time for another update! I am very excited about this one - while the previous update mostly focused on technical changes, this one brings a lot more atmosphere to the game.

## Weather and Clouds
- The previous daily weather system has been replaced with a much more dynamic system, which some people will remember from extremely old Photon versions. This provides much more natural weather variation which is also influenced by the biome you're in.
- The weather affects the clouds, fog and even the waving plants.
- The downside of this is that you can no longer adjust the weather per-day.
- Cumulus congestus clouds may now appear alongside the regular cumulus clouds rather than replacing them.
- I've adjusted a lot of the cloud shapes and lighting. Altostratus-like clouds will also appear now.
- Reworked rainy weather.
- Lightning flashes now illuminate the sky.
- Added rainbows :)

## Crepuscular Rays
- Added crepuscular rays through the clouds.
- These are also controlled by the new weather system.

## Colored Lights Fog Scattering
- When _Colored Lights_ is enabled, the fog will be illuminated by light sources.
- I also made the voxel volume for the Colored Lights centered ahead of the player rather than on them, so you can see colored lights much further with no performance impact.

## Improved Indirect Lighting
- SH Skylight is improved by using bent normals and enabled by default.
- Added a new approximation for indirect subsurface scattering based on AO.
- This makes shaded areas and dusk/dawn look much more natural.

## Miscellaneous
- New fast fog approximation, which is used in reflections, behind translucents and when volumetric fog is disabled. This means that fog no longer disappears in these cases.
- Updated water waves - I think they look much nicer now and the pattern is much less repetitive.
- Updated the moon with a new textured look.
- Improved the Pale Garden atmosphere with dense fog and light emission from eyeblossoms.
- Added an edge highlight effect to the Nether portal.
- Added materials for 1.21.5 additions.
- Added two new menu translations
- Italian translation by Jmayk.
- Russian translation by Timtaran.

As always I have also spent quite a lot of time fixing bugs and implementing various optimisations.

January 28, 2025

- added Chinese translation by NakiriRuri and OrzMiku
- added some modded blocks to block.properties
- adjust TAA to reduce ghosting
- adjust fog
- enable water texture on underground water for improved visibility
- hardcoded materials for 1.21 and 1.21.4 additions
- improve cloud filtering
- improve rough reflections
- improve silver lining on clouds
- increase sky vibrance, especially at sunset
- multilayer reflections: water no longer loses its surface behind stained glass
- new cloud types: cirrocumulus clouds, noctilucent clouds
- new sky option: Galaxy (milky way in the night sky)
- small plants are displaced close to the player
- water wave height variation
- many bug fixes and optimisations

April 9, 2024

Fix syntax error with Colored Lights

April 8, 2024

Initial release