Screenshot 1 of 5. Green hilly landscape with a pond, wooden houses and distant white buildings under blue sky, rendered with Sundial Lite.
What Sundial Lite works with.
| Platform | Java Edition |
|---|---|
| Loaders | Iris, OptiFine |
| Minecraft versions | 1.8.9, 1.16.5, 1.17.1, 1.18.2, 1.19.4, 1.20.6, 1.21.11, 26.1.2, 26.2, 26.3 |
Sundial Lite is a realistic shader pack for Minecraft Java on Iris and OptiFine, made by GeForceLegend. It is the free, open source cut of the full Sundial pack, tuned to balance quality, performance and compatibility. No other mods are required.
Shader loaders and versions
- Iris and OptiFine: Minecraft 1.8.9 to 26.3.
What it renders
Lighting is the core. Shadowmapping covers transparent shadows and water caustics, softened by percentage closer soft shadows, with screen space and cloud shadows layered on top. Screen space reflections, SSGI and SSAO handle bounce and depth, and a physical atmosphere reacts to the player's height.
- Blocky or realistic clouds, plus an extra 2D plane cloud.
- Realistic or vanilla style water, with water, nether and end fog.
- Volumetric light and volumetric fog.
- Full LabPBR support, with smooth and voxel parallax.
- Depth of field, temporal anti aliasing, motion blur, bloom and average exposure.
- FidelityFX RCAS sharpening and many configurable options.
Installation
- 1.Install Iris or OptiFine. The latest Iris is suggested for fewer bugs. Our shader install guide covers both.
- 2.Put the pack's .zip in the shaderpacks folder.
- 3.Select Sundial Lite in the loader's shader menu (Video Settings > Shader Packs for Iris).
Compatibility and trade-offs
The pack works with Distant Horizons, Voxy, Vivecraft, Colorwheel, Super Resolution and Physics Mod Pro. Compared with the full Sundial, it drops voxelization and world space ray tracing. That halves the cost of volumetric light and reflections and loses multiple bounce reflection, in exchange for better performance and mod compatibility.
SunDial Shader showcase with rain
Questions about Sundial Lite.
4 questions
How do I install Sundial Lite?
Install Iris or OptiFine, then place the Sundial Lite .zip in the shaderpacks folder. Open Video Settings > Shader Packs in Iris, or the shader menu in OptiFine, and select the pack. The latest Iris is suggested for the fewest bugs.
Does Sundial Lite work with Distant Horizons?
Yes. The pack lists Distant Horizons among its compatible mods, alongside Voxy, Vivecraft, Colorwheel, Super Resolution and Physics Mod Pro. Dropping voxelization and world space ray tracing is part of what keeps mod compatibility high.
Does Sundial Lite work on Bedrock?
No. It is a Java shader pack that needs Iris or OptiFine, and both are Java mods that Bedrock cannot run. Bedrock uses a different shader format.
How does Sundial Lite differ from the full Sundial?
Sundial Lite is the free, open source cut under GPL 3.0. It keeps most features but skips voxelization and world space ray tracing, so it loses multiple bounce reflection and gains performance and mod compatibility. The full pack is still incomplete and requires a subscription for early testing.
