# Revelation: a physically based shaderpack for Minecraft on Iris

> Revelation is a physically based Minecraft shaderpack that pairs atmospheric visuals with performance controls, built around Iris rather than OptiFine and targeting OpenGL 4.0 or newer. It ships no documented install steps or settings reference in the repository, so what a player actually gets is a compatibility contract and a list of mod integrations.

**HaringPro/Revelation** — An explorative shaderpack for Minecraft: Java Edition

- Repository: https://github.com/HaringPro/Revelation
- Stars: 660 · Forks: 40
- Language: GLSL
- License: Apache-2.0
- Published: 2026-10-21 · Updated: 2026-10-21 · Language: en
- Canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/haringpro-revelation

## The compatibility list is the contract

Revelation is described as a physically based Minecraft shaderpack for Minecraft: Java Edition, pairing rich, atmospheric visuals with practical performance controls, and the repository is short enough that the compatibility section carries most of the information a player actually needs.

The requirements are specific and narrow. A GPU and graphics driver with OpenGL 4.0 or newer support, and Iris 1.7.0 or newer as the mod loader. Then, stated in its own line, OptiFine is not supported.

That last line does most of the work in this section. OptiFine and Iris are alternative shader mod loaders rather than companions, so a pack that requires Iris is not usable on OptiFine at all, and a player who has spent years with OptiFine will need to move. The alternative would have been to support both, which is possible in principle but doubles the surface a shader author has to keep working, and the project has clearly chosen one.

The primary language of the repository is GLSL, which is what a shaderpack is written in, and the default branch is dev rather than main, which tells you the development happens on a branch that is not the default. The repository publishes no GitHub releases, so there is no versioned artifact to point at, and the last push was on 2026-10-20.

The licence is Apache 2.0, and the readme carries a Chinese translation alongside the English one, with a README.zh-CN.md at the root.

## What the performance controls claim, and what they leave open

The one line of positioning the readme gives is a pairing, and it is worth unpacking because both halves of it are claims about trade-offs rather than about features.

The first half is physically based rendering with rich, atmospheric visuals. Physical shading means light is modelled rather than approximated, which in a voxel world produces effects that read as depth and weight, and atmosphere in that context is usually about how distance, fog and lighting fall away rather than about post-processing filters.

The second half is practical performance controls. That phrase is doing real work, because a shaderpack's cost is per pixel and per frame, and the settings that control it are usually the difference between a pack you can run and one you cannot. A shaderpack that offers no performance controls is a pack that only works on a machine where everything else is stopped.

What the repository does not do is document those controls. There is no settings reference, no list of options, no description of which quality levels exist or how the presets are named. The heading of the project description also calls it an explorative shaderpack, which suggests the look is the point and the options exist to make it affordable rather than to be a documented feature surface.

So the honest position is that the performance claim is asserted and the mechanism is not described. A player will find the controls in the shaderpack's own options screen in game, but a reader deciding whether to try it is relying on the readme's word for it.

## The mod integration list is the most useful part of the readme

Five mods are named as integrations, and the list tells you more about the pack than a feature list would.

The readme names Voxy, Distant Horizons and Physics Mod as integrations without describing what they do, so the categories below are the obvious readings rather than documented claims. A super resolution mod and rrtt217's HDR Mod are also listed, which is a pair that points the other way, towards changing how the image is produced and displayed rather than what the world contains.

The pattern is coherent. A shaderpack sits in the render pipeline, and everything else in the pipeline has to agree with it. Mods that change what the renderer is asked to draw will break a pack that was not built with them in mind. Listing them as integrations is a claim that Revelation has been made to work with all of them, which is a much stronger claim than being merely compatible with vanilla.

The HDR and super resolution entries are the interesting pair, because they change the assumptions the shader makes about colour and resolution. A physically based shader has expectations about the display pipeline, and an HDR mod changes the display pipeline underneath it. A pack that names an HDR mod as an integration is telling you the two have been tested against each other rather than merely that both can be installed.

For a player, this list is actionable in a way the performance claim is not. If you run Voxy or Distant Horizons, you can check whether the pack claims to work with it, and if you do not run any of them, you can skip the section entirely.

## The credits explain where the imagery comes from

The credits section is short and it discloses something worth knowing about a shaderpack, which is that the visual assets are not necessarily the author's own.

Two entries are code contributions and technical support. Yong-Xin Mo is credited with code contributions and technical guidance, and GeForceLegend with code contributions and debugging. FactoriZation is credited with development assistance and AMD GPU testing, which is a detail that tells you something about the hardware coverage of the testing, since AMD GPU behaviour differs enough from Nvidia's to need explicit attention.

The fourth credit is the one that jumps out. NASA Scientific Visualization Studio is credited for the star map and lunar imagery.

That is a real provenance disclosure, and it has a practical consequence for anyone who plans to redistribute, modify or build on the pack. If the night sky in this shader is a NASA scientific visualisation, then the imagery has its own terms, separate from the shader code's Apache 2.0 licence, and the readme is telling you the source rather than leaving you to assume the author drew the stars. The fact that the licence file covers the project while the imagery comes from a third party is the same code and content split that shows up in any project that mixes authored code with sourced assets.

The credit list is also a reasonable signal about the project's shape. A shaderpack is not usually a large codebase, and the people named are contributing code and testing rather than a product team, which fits a project with a dev branch, no releases and a readme that fits on one screen.

## What the repository actually contains

The top level of the repository is short, and the two directories in it explain the project better than the prose does.

There is a shaders directory and a scripts directory, plus the usual repository furniture: an .editorconfig for consistent formatting, a .gitattributes, a .gitignore, the LICENSE file, the English README and its Chinese translation, and a README.zh-CN.md. There is no CI configuration, no issue templates, no test directory, no build system and no package manifest.

That is what a shaderpack is. There is nothing to build, because a shaderpack is a set of GLSL files that the mod loader compiles at load time, and there is nothing to test in the unit test sense because the output is a picture. The scripts directory is most likely for the manual steps in building a release, such as packaging the shader files, and the absence of a build pipeline in the repository is consistent with the absence of GitHub releases.

The readme also carries no installation section at all. There is no description of where to download the pack from, no list of files to copy into a shaderpacks folder, and no mention of a marketplace listing. For a project of this kind that is not unusual, since shaderpacks are distributed through mod platform listings and CurseForge style pages rather than from the source repository, and a reader who wants to install it will find the listing rather than the repository.

The practical upshot is that the repository is the source and the licence and the compatibility promise, and the distribution happens elsewhere. Anyone auditing the code for their own reasons can read it, and anyone installing it will get a zip rather than a build from this tree.

## Conclusion

Adopt Revelation if you play Minecraft on Iris with a driver that supports OpenGL 4.0 or newer and you want physically based lighting with the option to pull performance back. Do not adopt it if your setup runs OptiFine, since the project states plainly that OptiFine is not supported, and do not expect a documented configuration surface, because the repository documents compatibility and credits but not the settings. Before you commit, confirm Iris 1.7.0 or newer is installed, check the mod integrations list against what you actually run, and try the performance controls on your own GPU before assuming the atmosphere setting is affordable.

## FAQ

### What is Revelation?

Revelation is a physically based shaderpack for Minecraft: Java Edition that pairs rich, atmospheric visuals with practical performance controls. It is written in GLSL and is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

### What are the requirements for the Revelation shaderpack?

A GPU and graphics driver with OpenGL 4.0 or newer support, and Iris 1.7.0 or newer as the shader mod. The readme states that OptiFine is not supported.

### Which mods are supported by Revelation?

The readme lists Voxy, Distant Horizons, Physics Mod, a super resolution mod and rrtt217's HDR Mod as integrations, so the pack is intended to work with voxel rendering, distant terrain, physics and HDR or upscaling pipelines.

### Where does the star and moon imagery in Revelation come from?

The credits attribute the star map and lunar imagery to NASA Scientific Visualization Studio, alongside code contributions and debugging credits for Yong-Xin Mo, GeForceLegend and FactoriZation, who is also credited with AMD GPU testing.

### Does the Revelation repository have release versions?

No GitHub releases are published, and the default branch is dev rather than main. The repository contains a shaders directory, a scripts directory, the licence and the two readme files, with no build pipeline, since a shaderpack is compiled by the mod loader rather than built from source.

## Sources

- [HaringPro/Revelation on GitHub](https://github.com/HaringPro/Revelation)
- [Issues](https://github.com/HaringPro/Revelation/issues)
- [License: Apache-2.0](https://github.com/HaringPro/Revelation/blob/dev/LICENSE)
- [README](https://github.com/HaringPro/Revelation/blob/dev/README.md)

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Hysen Labs editorial analysis, written from the project's own repository and release notes. Cite the canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/haringpro-revelation