Vanilla Plus Shaders 1.19 / 1.18

Some shader packs and resource packs take things a bit too far when it comes to altering Minecraft for the better. Instead of improving Minecraft they attempt to establish a new identity. Instead of improving certain visual aspects in Minecraft, they completely replace them. Vanilla Plus Shaders has a different approach to how lighting and shaders should be handled. The execution and goal of the Vanilla Plus shader pack is to improve what already exists in Minecraft. Vanilla Plus Shaders has been developed by RRe36, a passionate Minecraft player that wished to create his own shader pack. Initially released in 2019, the shader pack received constant updates. The developer releases regular updates to address various compatibility issues and bugs. Due to the constant updates and the stunning visuals it introduces, the Vanilla Plus Shaders managed to get close to 900,000 downloads. Many popular Minecraft YouTubers have features the shader pack or use it in their own videos. To achieve this bold goal of improving vanilla Minecraft, the developers of the shader pack focused on several aspects. REe36 is the main developer of the shader pack and with great effort and dedication managed to assemble a remarkable project. The Vanilla Plus shader pack introduces several features. The main features that the shader pack comes with includes godrays, dynamic shadows, volumetric clouds, lens flares, motionblur, bloom and temporal anti-aliasing. All these features improve on several aspects of the game without chaging a single texture or texture resolution. The immediate effect is crisper textures for trees, leaves, dirt, gravel, different types of blocks, mobs, creeps and player textures. At the same time, the shadows in the game are much crisper. They are less fuzzy and are considerably less pixelated. Motionblur is another effect that is immediately observable when installing the shader pack.

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Vanilla Plus Shaders makes it so that when you move around or shift the camera quickly, you see less screen tear and adds a bluer effect that complements the game. Godrays and lens flares improve lighting quality over objects. It makes lighting much clearer and has a lesser negative effect over objects observed at a great distance. This means that depth of field and drawing distance is now considerably improved. Also, the lighting from the Sun and Moon are far superior to what you would normally see in vanilla Minecraft. These improvements were also improved by the addition of volumetric clouds. The new clouds are less boxy and look more cartoonish but they are still identifiable as vanilla Minecraft clouds. Lastly, you will certainly notice the new way in which water looks. Water has a much more fluid motion but because of all the other features that come with Vanilla Plus Shaders, lighting beneath water is considerably better. Water is no longer blurry but clearer and has a much more natural aspect. The Vanilla Plus Shaders add a good amount of improvements to the game. Minecraft simply looks better without toying around with textures by just having this shader pack installed. However, there is a price to pay for this eye candy. Vanilla Plus Shaders does require more resources to run smoothly. Also, it no longer works on computers with an Intel HD 5000 graphics card. It requires a modern graphics card to support all the features and maintain playable framerates. PvP players may not enjoy using the shader pack due to the way in which it affects game performance. At the same time, motion blur is not a popular feature amongst hardcore PvP players. However, some of the features of Vanilla Plus Shaders can be disabled which in turn also improve framerates. However, the framerates will still be lower than what you would experience while playing vanilla Minecraft. Because Vanilla Plus Shaders makes use of special features and it also changes sky textures, it needs to be installed with a tool such as OptiFine. The developer recommends using OptiFine version 1.18.x and above to install the shader pack. Also, the shader pack may not function correctly with some resource packs thus you will need to test it a bit in various combinations.