Attempts to faithfully recreate how your actual, real-life eyes see in the dark rather than just turning down the brightness
In the dark, saturation (colorfulness) is completely lost, what you see becomes blurrier and noisier (configurable in the shader settings), and the darkest color defaults not to true black, but to eigengrau (also configurable). I'm not too experienced with writing specifically Iris/Oculus shaders, so the light areas are also different from vanilla in this shader, but I think it nevertheless looks good :)
I've only tested this shader on 1.19.2 (same version as the DREAD horror modpack; not a coincidence), but it should probably work on other versions of Minecraft that Iris/Oculus support.
Inspiration from this video.
Remember to install either Iris (if you're on Fabric) or Oculus (if you're on Forge). This shader will not work without one of those.
- Edition: Minecraft Java
- File type: .zip (resource pack)
- Minecraft versions listed: 1.16.5, 1.17, 1.17.1
- How to install: Download the .zip resource pack — do not unzip it. → Put it in .minecraft/resourcepacks. → Enable it in Options → Resource Packs.
- Where to get it: Opens on Modrinth — not every file is mirrored on our own servers.
Install steps are the general flow for this file type — see the MC Java Mods guides for the full walkthrough.
- Downloads as realistic_dark.zip
- Download size: 2 KB
- Download link checked 7 Sept 2026 — working
These come from our own check of the pack file, not from the source page.