Complementary Shaders is a shader pack for Minecraft: Java Edition by EminGT, known for detailed lighting, water, and sky effects along with custom visuals for nearly every block in the game. It comes in two styles (Reimagined for a polished vanilla look and Unbound for something more realistic), which differ only in their default settings and can be freely customized either way. Quality profiles running from Potato to Ultra let you match it to your hardware.
Complementary Shaders is one of the most widely used shader packs for Minecraft: Java Edition, developed by EminGT under the Complementary Development project. It handles the usual shader things (lighting, shadows, water, sky), but what sets it apart is how far the detail goes. There are custom effects written for almost every block in the game, not just the obvious ones.
It started life as an edit of BSL Shaders before being completely rewritten, and it's been updated regularly ever since based on community feedback.
The part that confuses most people is that Complementary comes in two versions: Reimagined and Unbound. Both are downloads you'll see listed separately, which makes them look like rival shader packs. They aren't.
Reimagined and Unbound are two styles of the same shader pack. Same engine, same effects, same options menu. The only thing separating them is which settings are switched on by default.
That's straight from the developer, and it matters more than it sounds. You're not choosing a feature set; you're choosing a starting point.
Built for players who want Minecraft to look realistic. Realistic water, realistic clouds, a more grounded overall feel. If you've seen shader screenshots where Minecraft barely looks like Minecraft anymore, this is the style behind a lot of them.
Aimed at keeping Minecraft's own visual identity intact while making it look considerably better. The developer describes it as a reworked vanilla feel: blocky clouds stay blocky, and the game still reads as Minecraft. It's the style to pick if realistic shaders have always felt like they went too far for you.
Go with Unbound if realism is the goal, Reimagined if you want vanilla-but-better. And if you pick wrong, it isn't a problem: every setting is available in Shader Options either way. You can turn on blocky clouds in Unbound, or switch Reimagined over to realistic water. The styles converge as soon as you start adjusting things.
The feature list is long, but the parts you'll notice first:
Smaller touches turn up throughout: a mirror-like option for tinted glass, pixelated rainbows in the Reimagined style, chunk fade-in support, and various anti-aliasing options.
Complementary's settings menu is unusually deep. Nearly everything is exposed: individual effects, quality levels, colors, how strong a given feature is. It's all in Shader Options, reachable from the shader menu in your Video Settings.
This is why the Reimagined-vs-Unbound choice is less final than it looks. Both styles have access to exactly the same options.
Alongside the individual settings there are quality profiles: Potato, Low, Medium, High, and Ultra. These change a whole batch of settings at once, so you don't need to understand what every option does to get a sensible result. Pick a profile, see how it runs, adjust from there.
Let's be straight about this: shaders don't make Minecraft faster. They replace the game's rendering with something far more demanding, so you'll get fewer frames than vanilla. That's true of every shader pack, Complementary included.
What Complementary does put effort into is optimization: the developer's stated goal is a pack that's never obstructive during gameplay. Combined with the profile range from Potato to Ultra, that gives you room to find a setting your machine can actually handle rather than an all-or-nothing choice.
The practical approach: start on a lower profile than you think you need. If it runs comfortably, move up. That's a lot less frustrating than starting at Ultra and trying to work out which of forty settings is killing your frame rate.
Running Sodium alongside it is common, since Iris ships with Sodium included. It won't cancel out the cost of shaders, but a more efficient renderer underneath doesn't hurt.
Shader setups involve a few separate pieces, and mixing up the terms is where most people get stuck. Here's the chain:
Iris and OptiFine are shader loaders, not mod loaders. That distinction trips up a lot of guides. Iris is a mod that runs on top of Fabric or NeoForge; OptiFine is a standalone mod that includes shader support among its other features.
Complementary supports both. Iris is the path the developer points to now: the official installer bundles it, and the official setup instructions are written around it. OptiFine is still listed as supported and remains a practical option on many older Minecraft versions.
One more thing worth saying clearly: Complementary is a shader pack, not a mod. It goes in the shaderpacks folder, never in mods.
Complementary covers an unusually wide range of Minecraft versions, considerably wider than most actively developed shader packs. Builds are available for:
26.2, 26.1.x, 1.21.x, 1.20.x, 1.19.x, 1.18.x, 1.17.x, 1.16.x, 1.15.x, 1.14.x, 1.13.x, 1.12.x, 1.11.x, 1.10.x, 1.9.x, 1.8.x, and 1.7.10.
The current release supports Minecraft 26.2. If you're playing something older, there's very likely a build for it: older releases stay available on the official project pages, matched to the versions they were made for.
Complementary is distributed through the official Complementary Development website at complementary.dev, and through the developer's official project pages on Modrinth and CurseForge. Those are the sources to use.
Shader packs attract a lot of copycat download sites, and some of them use names close enough to the real project to be genuinely misleading. Going through the official website or the linked project pages avoids the issue entirely.
Two decisions before you download: which style you want, and which Minecraft version you're on.
Style: Unbound for a realistic look, Reimagined for a polished vanilla one. They're listed as separate downloads but they're the same pack with different defaults, so this isn't a decision you're stuck with. Pick whichever sounds closer to what you want.
Version: shader builds are tied to Minecraft versions. Check which version you're playing and pick the matching build. The current release targets Minecraft 26.2, and older builds remain available for older versions on the official project pages.
From there you have two routes:
The installer handles the shader loader and the shader pack together, which removes most of the steps below.
That Java requirement catches people out regularly. If the installer won't start, it's almost always this.
These are the official manual steps:
shaderpacks folder.OptiFine also supports Complementary, and the process is much the same: install OptiFine, open Video Settings → Shaders, use the Shaders Folder button to open the folder, drop the pack in without unzipping it, and select it from the list.
Worth knowing before you go this route: OptiFine's support for the newest Minecraft versions tends to lag behind. If you're on a current release, check that an OptiFine build actually exists for your version first; otherwise Iris is the more reliable choice. On older versions, OptiFine remains perfectly workable.
Once the pack is selected, open Shader Options from the shader menu. Everything is in there: individual effects, colors, quality levels, and the Potato through Ultra profiles.
Because both styles share the same options, you can push either one toward the other without downloading anything new. Set Unbound to blocky clouds, or give Reimagined realistic water. If you'd rather start clean from the other style's defaults, download that version and select it instead; both can sit in your shaderpacks folder at the same time.
shaderpacks. Check both, then refresh the menu.shaderpacks. It's an easy mistake when everything else you install goes in mods.Anything not on that list is worth checking against our guide to shaders that are not working, which covers black screens, GPU selection and pack conflicts.
They're two styles of the same shader pack, and the only difference is their default settings. Unbound defaults toward a realistic look; Reimagined keeps Minecraft's own visual identity while improving it. Both have access to identical options, so you can customize either one into the other.
Yes. Minecraft can't load shader packs on its own; you need a shader loader. Iris is the current recommended option and comes bundled with the official Complementary Installer. OptiFine also works and is often the practical choice on older Minecraft versions.
Yes. Iris includes Sodium, so most modern Complementary setups are already running both. Sodium isn't a requirement for Complementary itself, but it's a normal part of an Iris-based setup.
No. It's a Java Edition shader pack. Bedrock uses an entirely different system and can't load these files.
Most often because the file was unzipped (it needs to stay zipped) or because it isn't in the shaderpacks folder. If there's no shader menu at all, you don't have a shader loader installed yet. Try refreshing the menu once you've checked both.
Start with Potato or Low. They exist specifically for weaker hardware, and you can move up from there if performance is comfortable. Working upward from a low profile is much easier than diagnosing which individual setting is causing problems at Ultra.
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