Earthshade is a from-scratch Iris/OptiFine shader pack built around a genuine physically-based sky and a proper camera-style exposure pipeline — not the flat gradients and averaged-brightness tricks most packs lean on.
Highlights:
- Real atmospheric scattering — an analytic Rayleigh + Mie sky model (the same physics that makes the sky blue and sunsets red) evaluated per-pixel, cheap enough to run in reflections too, with Earthshade's own hand-graded color tint layered on top for art direction.
- Histogram-based auto exposure — a compute-shader eye-adaptation system that builds a real log-luminance histogram of the scene every frame, ignores sky and near-black shadow pixels so they can't skew the read, and smoothly adapts up/down like a real camera.
- AgX tonemapping for filmic, non-blown highlights.
- Volumetric god rays, soft shadows, and cloud shadows, with a domain-warped noise cloud layer instead of flat billboards.
- Parallax occlusion mapping & subsurface scattering for surface depth and translucency (leaves, foliage, etc.).
- Dynamic foliage wave, block emissives, water foam & caustics, ambient occlusion.
- Three built-in profiles — Performance, Balanced, and Cinematic — so it scales from low-end to showcase-quality without manual tuning.
Fully custom dimension shaders for the Overworld, Nether, and End.
