XON Shader

XON

Beautiful worlds. Performance by design.

Minecraft Java 26.3 · Iris + Sodium required · Free for personal play

Modern FPS optimization, shown in motion. In the local PC benchmark above, with frame rate capped at 120 FPS, recorded averages ranged from 115 to 119 FPS. XON’s modern, performance-focused rendering is designed to deliver a richer Minecraft world while keeping gameplay fluid and responsive.

Measured on one local PC. Results vary with hardware, resolution, scene, mods and settings.

Warm light. Sculpted skies. Water you can see into. XON brings a dramatic visual upgrade to Minecraft with a rendering pipeline built to keep costs under control.

The goal is a world you want to look at, with a frame rate you want to play at. Lower-end PCs are a design priority: carefully bounded effects, a dedicated Speed preset, and optional rendering-scale controls let you tune the experience to your hardware.

Explore the source · Report a problem · Help improve XON

More atmosphere. Carefully controlled cost.

XON puts its rendering budget into the details that change the feel of your world:

• Light with character. Warm sunlight, cool readable shade, sun and moon cast shadows, deeper ambient occlusion, and warm held-item light.
• A sky worth looking up for. Rounded procedural cumulus clouds, high cirrus wisps, golden-hour transitions, and storm-responsive colors.
• Water with depth. Broad swells, fine ripples, sky/cloud reflections, sun/moon glints, depth-sensitive color, optional refraction, and underwater caustics.
• Living detail. Waving plants and leaves, selective ore and crystal glow, restrained bloom, authored color grading, and adjustable camera motion blur.
• Distinct dimensions. Animated cellular lava in the Nether and flowing violet auroras across the End.

Performance is an engineering choice

Where XON saves work · How it works
Bounded shadows · A compact 1024-pixel map and 96-block default range, two hardware-filtered receiver taps, and entity/block-entity shadows disabled by default.
Smaller effect buffers · Half-resolution bloom, localized sunlight rays, and the refraction scene copy.
Focused sunlight rays · Four shadow-map samples within a cone near the sun.
Shared final-pass filtering · Depth-guided edge AA shares the final pass, without temporal history accumulation.
Distance-aware detail · Fine water detail fades with distance; foliage moves in the vertex stage within a bounded range.
Optional Boost modes · Experimental 85% or 75% world rendering with spatial reconstruction and restrained sharpening.

Designed for a small performance footprint and high frame rates. Actual impact depends on your GPU, resolution, world, mods, and settings. A controlled comparison is still needed to quantify FPS impact on specific hardware.

Your world. Your balance.

Setting · Choose it for
Balanced + Native · The intended visual experience: shadows, procedural clouds, bloom, refraction, caustics, and waving foliage.
Speed + Native · Lower rendering cost: removes cast shadows, sunlight rays, bloom, refraction, caustics, and procedural clouds, while keeping richer directional lighting, ore emission, color grading, and edge AA.
Boost Quality — 85% · Experimental reduced-resolution world rendering when GPU pixel shading is the limit.
Boost Performance — 75% · A greater reduction in world shading resolution, with a greater sharpness tradeoff.

Boost can soften foliage and thin geometry. It does not accelerate chunk generation or game simulation; the interface stays at display resolution.

Brightness, warmth, saturation, ambient occlusion, shadow quality, water effects, and more are adjustable in Shader Pack Settings. Camera motion blur is enabled by default and can be turned off. Clear-weather Overworld air fog is off by default.

Install and explore

1. Use Minecraft: Java Edition 26.3 with compatible Fabric, Iris, and Sodium versions. Both Iris and Sodium are required.
2. Download XON-Shader-v1.0.0.zip and put it intact in your instance's shaderpacks folder.
3. Open Video Settings → Shader Packs, select XON, and apply it.
4. Start with Balanced + Native. On lower-end hardware, try Speed first.

This is a client shader: no server installation or additional PBR texture pack is required. The original pack targets Iris 1.11.7 and Sodium 0.9.2; use compatible versions for Minecraft 26.3.

Compatibility, tradeoffs, and troubleshooting

• Confirmed target: Minecraft Java 26.3 with Iris + Sodium. Other Minecraft versions and OptiFine are unverified.
• Water reflects sky and clouds rather than buildings. Ore glow is surface emission, with a halo when bloom is enabled; it does not propagate colored light onto nearby blocks.
• Clouds use layered heightfields rather than a volumetric simulation. Sunlight shafts use the shadow map rather than global ray tracing.
• Motion blur follows the camera rather than independently moving objects.
• Distant Horizons, Voxy, VR, Vulkan renderers, macOS, and modded dimensions are not certified. Bedrock Edition is not supported.

For help, open an issue with your Minecraft/Iris/Sodium versions, GPU, preset, resolution, steps to reproduce, and relevant XON errors. Remove personal information before sharing logs.

Screenshots show a customized Minecraft world. The builds and unrelated resource-pack/model assets shown are not included in XON.

Free to play. Open to contributions.

Free personal gameplay. Source available. Rights reserved. Download and enjoy XON, adjust its exposed settings, and explore how it works on GitHub.

Want to help? The contribution exception permits forks and code changes solely to submit improvements to the official project. Read the contribution guide, then open an issue or pull request.

Standalone redistribution, reuploads, competing packs, ports, asset/code reuse, and commercial use require prior written permission. Public modpack redistribution also requires permission. See the complete XON Shader Personal Use and Contribution License 1.1.