Distant Horizons & Iris Shaders

Running Distant Horizons and a shader pack at the same time is the setup most players want and the one that breaks most often, because the two disagree about how far terrain gets drawn. This Fabric modpack settles that for you. It bundles Distant Horizons, which renders simplified low-detail terrain hundreds of chunks past the vanilla view limit, with the Iris shader loader, Sodium, and configs already matched to each other. What it does not include is a shader pack, so you pick one from the compatible list below and add it yourself.

What's in the pack

The value here is version matching, not volume. Distant Horizons, Iris, and Sodium each move on their own schedule, and a mismatched trio is the usual reason a hand-built instance crashes on launch or draws the far terrain as a grey smear. Each build pins one working combination for one Minecraft version and adds the optimization mods that make level-of-detail generation bearable.

• Distant Horizons for long-range level-of-detail terrain, with the shipped config set to a 256 chunk radius.
• Iris as the shader loader, paired with Sodium, Sodium Extra, and Reese's Sodium Options.
• C2ME, Lithium, FerriteCore, and Structure Layout Optimizer to speed up the chunk generation Distant Horizons leans on.
• Fabric API, Mod Menu, and Crash Assistant as the supporting layer.
• No shader pack. Iris arrives with shaders enabled and no pack selected, so adding one is your first job after launching.

Which shaders work with Distant Horizons

Distant Horizons draws its far terrain in its own pass, so a shader pack has to be written to handle it. Most well-known Iris packs now are, but not all of them, and an unsupported pack will light the near chunks correctly then leave everything beyond them flat, seamed, or missing entirely. These are the packs known to work.

• Bliss, from version 2.1.0 upward. Anything older has no Distant Horizons support at all.
• Complementary Reimagined, the usual default and a sensible first pick.
• BSL, a lighter option when the others cost too much frame rate.
• Rethinking Voxels, compatible on paper but the least proven of the group.
• Shrimple, Noble, and Photon, all confirmed to work though not indexed here yet.

How to install Distant Horizons & Iris Shaders

1. 1.Install a launcher that reads Modrinth packs, such as the Modrinth App or Prism Launcher.
2. 2.Install the pack from its Modrinth page, or download the .mrpack file and import it. Our modpack install guide covers both routes.
3. 3.Pick the build matching your Minecraft version and loader. Fabric is the line still receiving current builds.
4. 4.Raise the profile's memory to at least 4GB before launching, 6GB if you want the shipped render distance. Allocating more RAM walks through it launcher by launcher.
5. 5.Download a compatible shader pack, drop it into the instance's shaderpacks folder, then enable it under Video Settings. The shader install guide has the details, and fixing shaders that won't load covers it when nothing appears.
6. 6.Launch, then leave the game running while Distant Horizons generates the far terrain. It fills in gradually, not instantly.

Performance and settings

Distant Horizons builds its far terrain on the CPU, so this pack asks more of your processor and memory than of your graphics card, while the shader pack you add asks the opposite. That split is what makes the combination heavy on modest hardware. Memory is where most failed installs go wrong, and the requirements are blunt about it.

• 2GB will crash the game. Do not bother trying.
• 4GB is the floor. Expect some stutter, and stay under roughly 256 chunks.
• 6GB is the recommended figure and the one to aim for.
• 10GB can work against you, because Java's garbage collector struggles with a heap that large. Go there only if you are also running a heavy terrain generation mod.

The shipped config sets the Distant Horizons radius to 256 chunks at medium horizontal and vertical quality, and drops vanilla's own render distance to 8. That pairing is deliberate, because vanilla chunks past about 16 are wasted work once Distant Horizons draws everything beyond them. Pushing the radius past roughly 320 chunks eats memory and brings the stutter back. The practical routine is to raise the Distant Horizons CPU load setting, leave the game generating terrain, then drop the load back down before you actually play.

Compatibility and known conflicts

• Loaders: Fabric carries the current builds, up to Minecraft 26.2. A NeoForge build exists, but the newest one dates from December 2025 and stops at 1.21.11.
• Edition: Minecraft Java only. None of this runs on Bedrock, which uses a completely different file format.
• Side: client-side, so you can join any normal Java server and the extra view distance applies to your client alone.
• Servers: from Distant Horizons 2.3 onward a server can supply the far terrain. On older versions, and on any server without the mod, you have to explore the chunks yourself first.
• Versions: builds run from 1.20.1 through 1.21.11, plus 26.1.2 and 26.2 on Fabric.

A short list of mods reliably breaks this setup, almost all of them ones that reach into the rendering pipeline.

• Replay Mod and Alex's Caves both break it.
• OptiFine is not an option here. It is a rival to Iris rather than a companion, and the two cannot run together.
• Camera and third-person mods vary. Leawind's Third Person, Better Third Person, and Shoulder Surfing Reloaded are the ones known to work, though Shoulder Surfing has had trouble alongside Bliss.

Distant Horizons and Iris shaders in action

The payoff of this combination is a view running far past vanilla render distance while a shader pack handles lighting and water. The clip below shows Distant Horizons and Iris shaders running together in-game, so you can judge how the far terrain and the shading look before installing anything.

Distant Horizons and Iris shaders running in Minecraft

Watch on YouTube