Rethinking Voxels | Colored Lighting Shaders

What Is Rethinking Voxels?

Rethinking Voxels is a gameplay shaderpack built on top of Complementary Reimagined, the widely-used shader by EminGT. The edit keeps Complementary's clean, readable visual style but reworks the lighting model. Block lights (torches, lanterns, glowstone, and modded light sources) emit colored light and cast sharp shadows, so a redstone lamp glows warm and a soul lantern reads cool. The pack uses voxelization and SDF raymarching to trace against dynamic shapes, including custom models and entities, which is what lets shadows fall correctly on non-vanilla geometry.

Where most shader packs either chase full path tracing (slow) or skip dynamic light altogether, Rethinking Voxels aims for a fast middle ground: lights cast defined shadows without the heavy performance cost of a path tracer. It's developed on Iris with an AMD GPU on Linux and tested on NVIDIA, and it has become a popular pick for players who want light that behaves like light.

What Rethinking Voxels Adds

• Colored block lighting with a colored flood-fill light model and ray-traced occlusion, so light has direction, color, and shadow.
• Sharp shadows from light sources, the headline feature over base Complementary Reimagined.
• World-space reflections, volumetric lighting, bloom, atmosphere, and PBR (physically based rendering) support.
• A Per-Pixel Lighting toggle: turn it off to drop sharp shadows and recover performance on weaker hardware.
• Configurable quality levels (High/Medium), a max light trace count setting, and toggles to exclude entities, players, or foliage from raytracing.
• Modded light source support, so packs with custom lamps light up correctly.

Screenshots

How to Install Rethinking Voxels

You need the Iris shader loader for your Minecraft version. Iris is the recommended loader and required on current versions. OptiFine only works on older beta builds.

1. Install Iris for your Minecraft version.
2. Download the Rethinking Voxels .zip that matches your loader and Minecraft version.
3. In Minecraft, open Options → Video Settings → Shader Packs → Open Shader Pack Folder.
4. Drop the .zip into that folder, or drag-and-drop it straight into the shader selection menu.
5. Select Rethinking Voxels in the list and apply.

Compatibility and Known Issues

The lighting approach has one known trade-off: occasional sudden brightness changes when lights switch on or off. This is inherent to the technique and can't be fully removed without either hurting performance or dropping sharp shadows. If the flicker bothers you, disabling Per-Pixel Lighting removes the sharp shadows but smooths things out.

The pack is developed and tested on Linux with AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. Bugs on other platforms (macOS, Windows, Intel or Apple GPUs) may take longer to fix because they aren't caught in testing. For help, join the project's Discord or the shaderLabs #rethinking-voxels-gri573 channel.

FAQ

Is Rethinking Voxels a path-tracing shader? No. It's an edit of Complementary Reimagined that adds ray-traced block-light shadows. It's deliberately faster than full path tracers while still giving lights real shadows.

Does it work with OptiFine? Only on older beta builds. Current versions are Iris-only, so use Iris for up-to-date Minecraft.

Will it run on a low-end GPU? It can, if you drop to Medium quality and disable Per-Pixel Lighting. That removes the sharp shadows but keeps the rest of the visual upgrade. See also Complementary Shaders for a lighter alternative in the same family.

Does it support modded light sources? Yes. Modded lamps and custom light blocks are picked up, so modpack lighting works without extra config.