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Minecraft: Java Edition
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A STABLE, and GUARANTEED WORKING modpack for Iris Shaders and Distant Horizons compatibility.
It is highly recommended you read through this description as it has fixes for common issues. Do not report any bugs before you read the whole description.
To celebrate the release of Distant Horizons 2.3, we have partnered up with Spark Hosting! Use one of their vast cheap plans to try out DH on a server!
A note from the creator:
Ladies and Gentlemen, I'd like to extend a big thanks to SquireDot for maintaining this pack, his commitment to this project is extraordinary. I made this pack the day Distant Horizons released the shader compatability system but I definitely would not have been able to maintain it for long after so thank goodness I met this guy who can keep it alive! Thanks SquireDot! Cheers! -- Piotr Barcz
Requirements:
Before we begin, it is mandatory you increase your RAM allocation:
- 2GB - No, just No - This WILL crash your game, don't bother.
- 4GB - Minimum - Things will stutter slightly, although anything below 256 chunks should be fine.
- 6GB - Recommended - This is the optimum amount of RAM for Distant Horizons. This should be perfectly fine for playing with no to 20 light mods.
- 10GB - Careful - This much RAM can sometimes be a bad thing for the Java Garbage Collector. Only use this if you are using a heavy terrain generation mod such as JJThunder To The Max or Big Globe.
Note: Not every shader is compatible with Distant Horizons, even though it has come a long way, there are still a few shaders that don't support it. But most shaders will likely support Distant Horizons. Scroll down to see the full list of compatible shaders.
Good things you should know when using Iris & Distant Horizons
LODs are actually pregenerated chunks, but at a lower quality. Even though recent DH versions have drastically sped up the process, it can be very slow, especially when using high render distances.
Set the CPU load to I Paid For The Whole CPU in the Distant Horizons config to speed things up (Noisium and C2ME are added in this pack to help out significantly). Sadly, Distant Horizons is very CPU bound, so people with a weaker CPU will have to suffer with slow generation speeds.
As of Distant Horizons 2.3, you can now use DH on servers, allowing you to not need to explore thousands of chunks, yippee! However, any version of DH below 2.3 will require you to manually explore the chunks on your server, and if the server doesn't have DH on it, you will still need to manually explore them :(
It is always a good idea to keep your vanilla render distance relatively low when using Distant Horizons, anything more than 16 is not necessary.
For fast terrain generation, crank the CPU load and AFK, then come back, drop it down to minimal or low impact and play the game. Otherwise, just take screenshots.
Although DH has gone pretty efficient and less RAM intensive, using anything more than 320 chunks is probably not a good idea. Your RAM will be used up, and the game will start stuttering badly.
Any errors that say something about batching world generator timed out are normal, ignore them, hide the chat if they annoy you. Terrain is still loading despite that.
Shaders compatible with Distant Horizons & Iris (PUBLIC RELEASES)
Bliss Shaders (Make sure to use 2.1.0+, do not use anything less as they don't have DH support): https://modrinth.com/shader/bliss-shader
BSL: https://modrinth.com/shader/bsl-shaders
Complementary: https://modrinth.com/shader/complementary-reimagined
Rethinking Voxels (not tested by me, try it out yourself): https://modrinth.com/shader/rethinking-voxels
Shrimple (the first shader to be made compatible): https://modrinth.com/shader/shrimple
Noble: https://modrinth.com/shader/noble
Photon: https://modrinth.com/shader/photon-shader
For a full list of compatible shaders, please refer to this article:
https://gist.github.com/Steveplays28/52db568f297ded527da56dbe6deeec0e
List of mods that I know will break this:
Replay Mod
Alex's Caves
Most camera mods that mess with the rendering pipeline hard (do some testing, some work, some don't)
List of camera person mods that do work:
- Leawind's Third Person
- Better Third Person
- Shoulder Surfing Reloaded (Breaks with Bliss, removing it doesn't help you need to make a whole new instance. Note: I haven't tried it in a while, it may or may not be fixed. Lmk if it is indeed fixed.)
OptiFine (saying this because a lot of people acted like they were braindead and ran OptiFine in Fabric with Iris)
Terrain generation mods I recommend for to use with this:
Still Life: Absolutely one of the most realistic terrain generation mods to date. Biomes are insanely beautiful, smooth transitioning, and terrain itself is natural in its shape. Not compatible with other biome or terrain mods but if you want a very immersive world this one is currently (as of 8th of February 2026) the best one in terms of that.
Tectonic. Big mountains, beautiful generation, easy to use, always works.
Terraforged. Pregenerate a world in an older version of the game, don't use TF 1.18.2, has a fatal memory leak bug. TF has nice rivers, that's about it. Still Life beats it.
ReTerraforged: A modern version of Terraforged, although a public release hasn't come yet, you can find some unofficial builds, although we don't guarantee any safety.
Lithosphere. Up-to-date alternative to Terraforged with nice rivers and nice mountains. No point in using this without Still Life if you're not adding other biome mods.
William Wyther's Expanded Ecosphere. HUGE overhaul to make THE MOST BEAUTIFUL TERRAIN in Minecraft. I've never seen such gorgeous hills and wonderful forests, this is the king of terrain mods in my opinion. However Overhauled Overworld is the only one being maintained so I recommend slapping THAT on top of Lithosphere and calling it a day. Biomes that are a must see are the temperate rainforest crags and flooded temperate rainforest.
Big Globe - Another MASSIVE overhaul to the game, but also having some smaller, finer details. Good to try. Has a great ice flows biome that I doubt other mods can match yet.
JJThunder To The Max - If you like big mountains, you will love this. Just one thing, I hope you don't mind your LODs taking years to load, otherwise it's some beautiful terrain. Recommended to use C2ME OCL version if you have the patience to wait for that to load (more information at the Relativity MC discord server) but once it does terrain generation itself is incredibly fast as it runs on the GPU. Keep in mind that's an early release test thing and could just straight up not work.
And last but not least, HOW TO FIX THE BIGGEST BUG:
If you experience the "Hall Of Mirrors" effect using Bliss shaders, here is how to cause the issue (so you know how to avoid doing it) and how to fix it:
Visual doppler effect will happen when you switch off the DH renderer while shaders are on. First turn off shaders, then turn off the renderer, then start shaders.
If you've already crashed the renderer, restart the game, this always has worked for me, no reason it shouldn't for you.
This issue should most likely be fixed post DH 2.1, so I doubt you will have this issue unless you are using a very old version of DH.
None of the mods in this pack were created by me, they are packaged here for your convenience.