Absolute Daybreak

Watch the showcase on YouTube: https://youtu.be/bEb7NNydiNs

Absolute Daybreak is a cinematic shader pack for Minecraft: Java Edition that keeps the game’s blocky charm while giving it real light, real skies and real water. Every line of it is written from scratch. It is not an edit or fork of another shader pack.

What makes it different

• Seamless ground transitions: grass, dirt, sand, gravel, snow, moss and paths softly blend into each other at block edges, using the real neighbouring texture and biome colour. No more hard block seams on the ground.
• HD relief for vanilla textures: every block texture gets subtle generated depth, so stone, dirt and wood catch the light without any resource pack.
• Built for screenshots and videos: AgX film tonemapping, temporal anti-aliasing with sharpening, and smooth, flicker-free shadows.

Features

Lighting

• Soft real-time shadows with variable penumbras (PCSS): sharp near contact, soft further away
• Coloured shadows through stained glass, sunlight through water with caustics
• Leaves and grass glow when backlit (subsurface scattering)
• Ground-truth ambient occlusion
• Warm, natural block light, held torches light up the world around you
• First-person player shadow

Atmosphere

• Physically based sky with real sunsets, twilight and a starry night sky
• Volumetric cumulus clouds with cloud shadows moving across the land
• Volumetric light shafts and low morning mist
• Rain darkens the sky, wets the ground and forms puddles

Water

• Animated waves, reflections of the world and the clouds, sun glints
• Refraction, depth-based colour and clarity, underwater fog

Nature

• Grass, flowers, crops, leaves and vines sway in gusty wind, stronger in the rain

Camera

• Automatic exposure, bloom, vignette and colour controls

Resource packs

• Full LabPBR support (normal and specular maps)
• Looks great with vanilla textures, Faithful and other vanilla-style packs

Before and after

Gallery

Profiles and settings

Four profiles (Low, Medium, High, Ultra) plus a detailed settings menu, available in English and German. On an AMD RX 6600 at 1080p, the High profile runs at about 120–175 FPS in our test scenes.

Compatibility

• Loader: Iris (with Sodium). OptiFine is not supported.
• Minecraft: 1.20.1 (see the files tab for tested versions)
• GPUs: AMD, NVIDIA, Intel (OpenGL 4.3+). Apple devices are not supported.

Installation

1. Install Iris (the Iris installer also sets up Sodium and Fabric).
2. Download Absolute Daybreak. Do not unzip it.
3. In game: Options → Video Settings → Shader Packs → Open Shader Pack Folder and put the zip inside.
4. Select Absolute Daybreak. Start with the High profile; use Ultra for screenshots.

Permissions

• Allowed: screenshots, videos and streams. A link back is appreciated.
• Allowed: modpacks on CurseForge or Modrinth that use the platform’s built-in shader support.
• Not allowed: re-uploading, redistributing or renaming the pack.

Showcase images and video captured with the Faithful 32x resource pack.