Septonious' fantasy-styled shader pack for Iris and OptiFine, with voxel-based colored block lighting, volumetric clouds and an aurora that changes from night to night. Colored lighting is Iris-only and switches off on macOS and on Intel graphics under Windows.
Solas Shader is a fantasy-styled shader pack for Minecraft: Java Edition by Septonious, built around colored block lighting, volumetric clouds and a detailed night sky. It runs on Iris or OptiFine, but the two do not get the same shader. Colored block light, the feature its own description leads with, exists only on Iris, and even there it switches itself off on certain systems.
Minecraft's own light levels carry brightness but no color, so a shader that wants colored light has to work it out itself. Solas builds a voxel copy of the blocks around you, marks the ones that emit light, and floods colored light outward through that volume, so lava and an amethyst cluster lighting the same cave wall tint it in two different colors. Septonious credits sixthsurge, the author of Photon, for the voxelization and light propagation approach.
That volume is stored in custom 3D images, a feature Iris offers to shader packs and OptiFine does not, which is why the project page states that colored block lighting is not supported on OptiFine. Without it, every light source shares one color, adjustable under Colors, then Vanilla Blocklight Color.
The shader also compiles the feature out entirely in three situations, visible in its own source: on macOS, on older Minecraft versions, and on Intel graphics under Windows. Light Fog, which lets light sources glow through fog, depends on the same volume and disappears with it. If torches and lanterns all light the same shade on your machine, one of those is the likely reason, not a broken install.
Three settings under Lighting shape the effect. Voxel Volume Size sets how far around you colored light is calculated, and its own tooltip warns that higher values greatly reduce performance. Colored Lighting Radius controls how far each light spreads, and Colored Lighting Brightness scales the result. The individual colors of torches, soul fire, copper torches, amethyst, froglights and more than a dozen other sources can be retuned under Colors, then Multicolored Blocklight Color.
Septonious lists Iris as the preferred loader, and the source shows why beyond colored light. Terrain lit up by a nearby lightning strike and glowing armor trims are compiled only for Iris. On OptiFine, the author notes, custom skies supplied by resource packs are not supported either.
OptiFine still has a role. Solas is tagged back to older Minecraft versions that Iris never supported, and on those OptiFine is the only way to run it. On anything recent, Iris, installed with Sodium, is the better choice.
The aurora is driven by a simulated geomagnetic index, the same Kp scale used to forecast real auroras, calculated from the world's day counter. On some nights it is bright and spread across the sky, on others faint, and on some it does not appear at all. Snowy biomes add three points to the index, so that is where it shows most often and most strongly. It only appears at night, and fades out in rain and underground. Constant Visibility in the aurora settings pins the index high every night.
Clouds follow the same idea when Dynamic Weather is on: their amount, height, thickness and density shift from one in-game day to the next. Biome feeds into the atmosphere as well. Deserts, swamps, jungles, cherry groves and mushroom fields each tint the daytime sky, fog and clouds; lush caves and the deep dark give cave fog its own color; and lush caves, deserts, swamps, jungles and the pale garden all thicken the fog.
The other dimensions get their own treatment. The Nether fills with drifting smoke, while volumetric light and lens flare are switched off there. The End has a nebula, a black hole with gravitational lensing, occasional flashes and a vast rotating disk of cosmic cloud around the central island, which Solas calls the Ender protoplanetary disk.
Solas ships four profiles, and a fresh install starts at the equivalent of High. Each step adds something specific:
Outside the profiles, Shadow Distance, Shadow Resolution and Voxel Volume Size carry the most weight. Septonious has also called PBR one of the most demanding features in Solas and keeps the integrated PBR options tied to the profiles for that reason, so switching them off shows your profile as Custom. There is no official benchmark, and a frame rate measured on someone else's machine says little about yours. The reliable method is to start on the default and step down one profile at a time.
With no resource pack at all, Solas generates its own material effects: reflective surfaces, surface detail and glowing blocks. That includes ores. Diamond, emerald, lapis and redstone ore glow by default, while copper, gold and iron have toggles that start off, all under PBR Config, then Integrated PBR, then Emissives Config.
For a labPBR or older SEUS-format pack, the switch is Advanced Materials under PBR Config, then Material, with Material Format set to match the pack. The project page still calls this option "PBR Resourcepack", which is not the label in the current menu. The in-game tooltip for Generated Specular also warns against using it with an external PBR pack. Septonious acknowledged in mid-2026 that metals can render pure black with some PBR packs. A PBR rework followed in the next release, yet reports continued after it, so third-party PBR packs remain the least predictable part of Solas.
Solas has dedicated programs for Distant Horizons and Voxy, the two level-of-detail mods, so far terrain is shaded by the pack too. Colored lighting does not reach those distant chunks under either mod. Real shadows stop at Shadow Distance, and the Screen Space Shadows option takes over beyond that line, which its tooltip describes as very useful with both mods. The official site also lists Colorwheel, the mod that lets the Flywheel renderer behind Create's moving parts work with Iris shaders. Septonious shipped a Colorwheel fix in mid-2026 after reports that it had broken.
Every Solas archive contains a short notice from Septonious: the pack has two official download sources, CurseForge and Modrinth, and finding that notice inside any other shader pack means the code was taken from Solas. Sites offering their own "Solas Shaders" download are neither of those.
Solas is a shader pack, so it needs a shader loader and belongs in the shaderpacks folder, never in mods. If you have never set up a loader, the shader installation guide covers it from scratch. What follows is specific to Solas.
Open the Solas Downloads section on this page and click Download on the release for your Minecraft version. It takes you to Septonious' Modrinth release. Modrinth and CurseForge are the only places Septonious publishes Solas.
For crashes, an empty shader list or the game using the wrong GPU, see shaders not working.
Yes, but not in full. OptiFine loses colored block lighting, resource-pack custom skies and a few Iris-only effects such as lightning lighting up nearby terrain and glowing armor trims. Septonious lists Iris as the preferred loader. OptiFine remains the only option on Minecraft versions older than 1.16.5.
Colored lighting needs Iris and Minecraft 1.19.2 or newer, and Solas disables it in code on macOS and on Intel graphics under Windows. In any of those cases every light source uses one color, and the Light Fog effect is switched off along with it.
Solas turns colored lighting off on macOS. Beyond that, Apple Silicon users have reported it failing to render at all, in an issue still open on the project's GitHub. A community member has published an experimental fix, but it is not part of an official release.
Septonious describes it as aiming for a moderate performance cost, and no official benchmark exists. A fresh install starts at the equivalent of the High profile. Shadow Distance, Voxel Volume Size and the integrated PBR options carry the most weight, the last by the author's own account.
That is intended. Its strength comes from a simulated geomagnetic index that changes with the in-game day, rises in snowy biomes, and fades in rain and underground, so some nights have none. Turning on Constant Visibility in the aurora settings makes it appear every night.
Turn on Advanced Materials under PBR Config, then Material, and set Material Format to labPBR 1.3 or SEUS/Old PBR to match the pack. Turn off Generated Specular, which the shader warns against using with an external PBR pack. Some PBR packs still render metals black, which the author has acknowledged.
Yes, and with Voxy. Distant chunks are shaded by Solas but without colored lighting. Screen Space Shadows can continue shadows beyond the normal Shadow Distance, which the shader's own description recommends with both mods.
Yes, through its integrated PBR. Diamond, emerald, lapis and redstone ore glow by default, and copper, gold and iron can be switched on under PBR Config, Integrated PBR, Emissives Config. Coal is not included.
Yes, with version 3.7b released in August 2026. In June 2026 Septonious called the Iris and OptiFine version effectively end-of-life and said major PBR work was planned for a rewrite on Aperture, the Iris team's new shader platform, which does not run existing packs. Two releases have followed since then.
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