Feather Gradient Shadery pre Minecraft 26.3

Feather Gradient

Have you ever wanted a shader, thats not too fancy and shiny, and over the top? Well look no further! A simple Minecraft shader that has a full bright built in! Looks simple but realistic and minimal is here!

Quick Start

To use Feather Gradient with Iris in Minecraft, launch Minecraft, go to Options > Video Settings > Shader Packs, drag and drop your shader(.zip file) directly, and click on your shader from the list to enable it! Reccommended to use 16 chunks of render distance.

Features

• Full Bright / Night Vision: Maximizes visibility everywhere, making caves, underwater areas, and the Nether easy to see in complete darkness.
• Simple Gamma Boost: Artificially brightens the world without introducing distracting lighting tricks, reflections, or shiny highlights.
• Pure Vanilla Look: Keeps original block textures, and colors
• Clean Fog Fading: Retains smooth distance fog so chunk borders fade naturally rather than cutting off abruptly.

How it Works

Instead of relying on heavy lighting calculations, this shader bypasses the standard Minecraft lightmap entirely inside the Fragment Shader (composite.fsh). Rather than multiplying surface colors by ambient light levels or dynamic light sources, it samples raw color data directly from the texture atlas (gtexture) and applies a lightweight linear gamma boost. Bypassing the multi-pass lightmap calculations reduces the GPU overhead, allowing full brightness across all dimensions without sacrificing frame rates.

To ensure visual clarity without artifacting, the gamma scaling explicitly isolates the RGB channels while leaving the alpha channel untouched. This avoids the blending bugs common in simple brightness fixes, keeping semi transparent surfaces like tinted glass, water, and foliage—rendering properly. By choosing a direct mathematical boost over complex tone mapping algorithms (like ACES or Reinhard), it eliminates specular glare, bloom, and lighting stalls.

Credits and Acknowledgements

A lot of help was used by the Hack Club Lumen Shader Guide. And the minecraft shader template by ascpixi set a foundation haveing all the files in the proper directories and such so I can immediately hop into coding.