What you see

Photon's mood, on a smaller budget.

Cornea aims for the warm, soft look of the big shaderpacks and spends its frame time where your eye lands first: the light near you, the sky above you, and the water in front of you.

LIGHT

Light that has a colour

Torches glow orange, soul fire glows blue and amethyst tints a cave purple. Light spreads through the blocks around you, and nearby blocks and mobs cast short shadows from it.

SKY

A sky worth looking up at

Two layers of volumetric clouds with thin cirrus above them, auroras on clear nights, and in the End, a black hole that bends the starlight around it.

WATER

Water you can see into

Uneven waves that never line up in rows, caustics dancing on the seabed and godrays under the surface. A torch or lava pool lights the water from below.

Side by side

Same spot. Drag the line.

Each pair was shot from the same place, with Cornea left of the line and Photon right of it. Drag the line to compare, and use the arrows to move between scenes.

Photon, a cave mouth Cornea, a cave mouth
Cornea Photon
Cave mouth OVERWORLD · CAVE · 1 / 7

Drag the line, or tab to the image and use the arrow keys. Photon is made by SixthSurge and is shown here only for comparison.

Under the hood

Where the frames come from.

Most of Cornea's speed comes from doing expensive work less often, at lower resolution, and only when it shows.

A

Half-size clouds and light shafts

Clouds and godrays render at half resolution and fill in over a few frames, so they cost about a quarter of the pixels.

SKY
B

Light that spreads a step at a time

Coloured light flows one block per frame through a 96-block volume around you, instead of being solved from scratch every frame.

LIGHT
C

Exposure from the light, not the screen

The camera sets its brightness from how much sun and sky reach you, so there's no costly average of the whole picture.

CAMERA
D

Shine built into the pack

Metals, polished stone, gems and glowing ores get their gloss and surface detail from Cornea itself. No resource pack, no extra textures to read.

BLOCKS
E

Off really means off

Every effect drops out of the shader when you switch it off, so the Low profile does less work, not just less drawing.

SETTINGS

Works with

Made for the setup you already run.

Cornea needs Iris, and Iris needs Sodium, so install both. It is built and tested on Minecraft 26.x, including clients that bundle them such as OneClient.

Iris · required Sodium · required Minecraft 26.x OneClient Chlorine Distant Horizons Voxy Crossed out: not supported yet. Cornea skips far-distance terrain to keep its frame budget for what's close to you.