Screenshot 1 of 1. MinecraftHub-generated cover art for Dither: a floating lakeside block island, under a sunset sky
What Dither works with.
| Platform | Java Edition |
|---|---|
| Loaders | Iris |
| Minecraft versions | 1.20, 1.20.6, 1.21.11 |
Dither is a dither shader pack for Minecraft Java that redraws the world as hand-drawn pixel art. It runs on Iris, sits in the lightest performance tier, and is client-side only, so a multiplayer host does not need it.
Shader loaders and versions
- Iris: Minecraft 1.20 to 1.21.11.
What it does to the picture
Snorfield built the pack around a low-resolution retro look and exposes almost every part of it in the Shader Settings screen. Four effects carry the style.
- Per pixel dithering.
- Palette posterization, so the world is drawn only with the colors in a chosen palette.
- Edge detection for sharp outlines.
- Crisp downsampling for a blocky, low-resolution finish.
Swapping the palette
Changing colors means editing a file, which Snorfield calls a limitation of shader packs. The pack ships a palettes.txt with ready-made palettes, and Lospec is the suggested place to find more.
- 1.Open the pack's shaders folder. It works zipped or unzipped, but you need to unzip it to edit.
- 2.Convert your hex palette with Snorfield's palette-to-shader web tool.
- 3.Paste the result into palette.glsl and save.
- 4.Reload the shader pack in game.
Installing it
Put the .zip in your shaderpacks folder and pick it under Video Settings > Shader Packs. The shader install guide covers Iris setup step by step. OptiFine is untested by the author, so treat it as unsupported.
The trade-off is taste and effort. The look is deliberately harsh, and Snorfield admits it takes fine-tuning to get appealing images, which is why the options list is so long.
Questions about Dither.
4 questions
Does Dither work with OptiFine?
It might, but it is untested. The pack is written to be fully compatible with Iris, and Snorfield has not tried OptiFine. If you test it there, results can be reported on the author's Discord. For a reliable setup, use Iris.
Why does the lighting look inverted in Dither?
Iris has a lightmap issue that inverts lighting on releases from 1.21.9 upward. It is not a fault in the pack. The pack still works, and Snorfield recommends 1.21.8 if you want correct shading.
How do I change the color palette in Dither?
Edit palette.glsl inside the pack's shaders folder. Convert a hex palette to shader code with Snorfield's palette-to-shader web tool, paste it in, save, then reload the pack. You can also copy one of the ready-made palettes from palettes.txt.
Is Dither light on hardware?
It is listed in the potato performance tier and described as high-performance by its author. That is a positioning label, not a hardware promise, so actual frame rates depend on your system and settings.
