Brilliance Shaders

The sun is gone. In its place hangs a black hole.

Brilliance replaces the sun with a huge, ray-traced, Interstellar-style black hole. It has a glowing accretion disk, a razor-thin photon ring, and real gravitational lensing that bends the disk over and under the shadow and warps the stars behind it. The rest of the world gets soft shadows cast by the disk's light, a realistic atmosphere with drifting clouds, and water that reflects the black hole, all tuned so nothing clashes with it.

Features

The black hole

• Real light bending. Every pixel near the hole follows a curved light path around a black hole. That curving is what bends the far side of the disk into the famous arcs above and below the shadow.
• Four styles: Gargantua (the classic thin disk), Plasma (stormy, glowing gas), Quasar (relativistic jets shooting from the poles), and Dormant (no disk, just a faint ring of starlight around the shadow).
• Seven color profiles: Interstellar Gold, White Hot, Ember, Event Horizon Telescope, Nebula Violet, Quasar Blue, and Aurora Green.
• Two looks: Interstellar (even brightness, like the film) or Physically Accurate (the side of the disk spinning toward you glows brighter and bluer).
• Fine detail up close. The disk's filaments get sharper as the hole gets bigger on screen, so zooming in never turns it blurry or blocky.
• Placement: Up Close (default) puts it huge and near, rising in the east, climbing the sky and setting in the west. Sun mode follows the vanilla sun's path instead.
• Tilt it your way: forward tilt (0° is exactly edge-on from where you stand), side tilt from −90° to +90°, and optional slow drifts, so the view changes from day to day.
• Zoom from 1× to 6×, big enough that it no longer fits on screen.
• Per-realm presets: Gargantua in gold over the Overworld, Nebula Violet in the End (open void all around, no horizon), and no black hole in the Nether.

The world

• Shadows cast from the black hole's direction, soft and contact-hardening.
• Water reflects the sky and the lensed black hole, with moving waves.
• Daytime sky with real atmospheric scattering, puffy cumulus and high cirrus clouds that part around the hole, or switch to Space sky for a dark sky full of stars and nebulae.
• Gentle lens flare: soft ghosts and fine rainbow glare rays.
• Waving plants and leaves, bloom, filmic tone mapping.

Requirements

• Minecraft 26.3 with Fabric and Iris (1.11.7 or newer) + Sodium.
• Graphics API set to OpenGL (Iris does not support Vulkan).

Installation

1. Install Fabric, Iris and Sodium.
2. Drop the downloaded .zip into your shaderpacks folder (don't unzip it).
3. In game: Options → Video Settings → Shader Packs → select Brilliance Shaders.

Every setting lives in the shader pack's menu (Shader Packs → Brilliance Shaders → Settings), with profiles from Low to Ultra.

Performance

The black hole is ray traced, so this pack is on the heavier side. Tips:

• Quality (under Black Hole) has the biggest effect on speed. High is the default; Medium or Low help on weaker GPUs.
• Shadow distance and resolution (Lighting) are the next biggest costs.
• On Macs with Retina screens: in Video Settings, set Fullscreen Resolution to your screen's real resolution (for example 2560x1664 on a 15" MacBook Air). By default Minecraft renders far more pixels than the screen can show. This alone made it about 30% faster in testing on an M4 MacBook Air, which holds roughly 30–40 FPS at default settings.

Known limitations

• Developed and tested on macOS (Apple M4). It's written to work on Windows and Linux too, but that's less tested, so please report any problems.
• No Distant Horizons support.
• The Nether has no black hole, by design.

License

MIT. Use it, learn from it, modify it.