Psychedelic Shaders

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A shader pack that simulates altered visual perception in real time.

Psychedelic Shaders is a heavily extended edit of BSL Shaders, adding a full perceptual distortion pipeline on top of BSL's lighting, shadows and post-processing. Everything BSL does — soft shadows, volumetric light shafts, water reflections, bloom, TAA — is still there. On top of it sits a simulation layer that makes the world drift, breathe, warp, repeat and dissolve into geometry.

Drag one slider from 0% and watch Minecraft come apart.

What you actually see

Every effect below has its own onset threshold, so raising the intensity recruits new phenomena rather than just cranking one effect harder. The progression is the whole point.

Early — subtle

• Acuity lift — everything looks a little sharper, brighter and more interesting
• Colour enhancement — saturation deepens, colours get richer
• Drifting — surfaces begin to flow and slide as though the world were liquid, driven by domain-warped noise so it never loops
• Breathing — slow radial swelling, the classic sense that walls and terrain are inhaling

Mid — unmistakable

• Tracers — moving objects and light sources smear along their path
• After-images — objects leave a lingering ghost in the complementary colour
• Form-constant geometry — honeycombs, lattices, spirals, tunnels and cobwebs bloom across surfaces
• Texture crawling — patterns bind to detailed blocks and crawl over stone, bark and gravel
• Spatial warping — straight lines stop being straight, distances stop being trustworthy
• Colour shifting — surfaces drift through the spectrum independently instead of being uniformly tinted
• Haloes and auras — coloured bloom around torches, lava and the sun

Deep — overload

• Symmetry and recursion — the field mirror-folds into six to twelve wedges, mandala-style
• Fractal detail — a kaleidoscopic iterated function system, so structure repeats at every zoom level
• Closed-eye visuals — as light drops, internal geometry takes over. Caves and nights get strange
• Visual noise — fine animated grain and sparkle across the whole field

Two modes

The same geometry, two completely different characters:

This is not a colour filter

The geometry is not invented, and it is not a texture overlay. It is generated per-pixel from published perceptual research.

In the 1920s and 30s Heinrich Klüver catalogued the recurring geometric forms people report in altered states and found they collapse into four categories, now called the form constants. The same four turn up under flicker stimulation, in migraine aura and in pressure phosphenes — strong evidence they come from the structure of the visual cortex itself. All four are implemented as separate, individually adjustable layers:

• I — tunnels, funnels, cones → concentric rings in log-polar space
• II — spirals → twisting arms from the same centre
• III — gratings, lattices, honeycombs → three gratings at sixty degrees, producing a true hexagonal network
• IV — cobwebs → radial spokes crossed with rings

Tunnels and spirals are built in log-polar coordinates specifically because that is what the retinocortical mapping predicts: a straight line across the visual cortex maps to a spiral in the visual field, and evenly spaced cortical stripes map to rings that crowd toward the centre. That is why the spacing looks right instead of merely circular.

Everything is temporally driven by real frame time, so trails, drift and after-images behave identically at 30fps and 240fps.

Fully configurable

Over twenty individual sliders under Shader options → Psychedelics, grouped into pages:

• Motion & Space — drifting, breathing, spatial warping, depth-aware distortion
• Geometry & Patterns — fractal detail, symmetry, each of the four form constants, closed-eye visuals, texture binding, peripheral emphasis
• Colour & Light — enhancement, colour shifting, haloes, acuity, visual noise
• Trails & After-images — tracers and complementary after-images

Every one can be turned off independently. Want melting terrain with no colour shift? Want tracers and nothing else? Want the lattices but not the spirals? All fine.

Plus an Overall Intensity master that scales everything at once without changing which effects are active, and a Quality setting for lower-end hardware.

Compatibility

• Iris (recommended) or OptiFine
• Works in the Overworld, Nether and End
• Inherits BSL's version support and its full lighting feature set
• Leave TAA enabled if you can — it stops the moving geometry from crawling with aliasing

Performance

Cost scales with intensity. Effects below their onset threshold are branched out entirely, so at 0% the simulation costs literally nothing and its temporal buffers are never even written — it performs exactly like stock BSL until you turn it up. Drop Quality to Fast if you need frames back.

Photosensitivity

Everything here moves smoothly. There is no full-screen strobing anywhere in the pack. If you are sensitive, the settings worth turning down first are Symmetry and Visual Noise.

Free edition

This edition includes both modes at up to 50% intensity, the complete form-constant geometry set, drifting and breathing, colour shifting, tracers, after-images, symmetry, closed-eye visuals and every configuration slider listed above.

A Full edition also exists, which raises the ceiling to 100% and adds a third mode plus real escape-time fractal rendering (Mandelbrot, Julia, Burning Ship, Newton basins) and nested labyrinth linework. Details are on my site, linked at the bottom of this page.