Lost Tape Shader

📼 Lost Tape Shader

A nostalgic analog-horror shaderpack for Iris and Oculus. Dense breathing fog swallows the horizon, real shadow-mapped shadows crawl across the terrain, and volumetric light shafts cut through the haze — all wrapped in VHS grain, dithering, and PSX-era vertex wobble.

No heavy PBR pipeline, no bloat. Built on the classic fixed-function shader pipeline (GLSL 120), it runs fast even on weak GPUs while nailing the Somber-style found-footage dread.

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✨ Features

• Breathing fog — dense exponential fog that slowly swells and recedes, with adjustable start distance and sky swallowing
• Real shadows — distortion-mapped shadow maps (entities included) with adjustable strength, softness (hard / PCF soft / very soft), resolution, distance, and sun path tilt
• Volumetric light shafts — god rays marched through the shadow map; fog darkens inside shadow columns, so bright streaks run along shadow edges
• Contact shadows (SSAO) — objects cast soft screen-space shadows in corners and around block light, so torches produce visible shading
• Smart torch light — block light is exempt from the darkness curve and protects lit areas from shadow darkening; caves stay pitch black
• Moonlight — adjustable cool night ambient that only affects sky-exposed surfaces
• PSX retro mode — vertex snapping (terrain-only or including mobs), pixelation, Bayer dithering with reduced color depth
• Analog overlay — film grain, vignette, chromatic aberration, scanlines, analog flicker, VHS wobble
• Sun & moon toggles — remove them from the sky entirely while the light shafts keep falling (ARG nightmare fuel)
• 13 hand-tuned presets — every preset sets all options for a consistent one-click look

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📸 Screenshots

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🎞️ Presets

Preset	Character
Lost Tape (default)	Balanced analog-horror: fog, sickly green tint, grain, light PSX wobble
Director's Cut	Dense fog, swallowed sky, dark, scanlines
Verity	Very dark, desaturated, crushed blacks, VHS glitch, grim nights
Backrooms	Yellow-tinted, washed-out found footage with fluorescent flicker
VHS Tape	Noisy cassette: scanlines, wobble, sepia, strong chromatic aberration
Camcorder '98	Clear-ish but shaky found-footage image, brighter nights
PSX Horror	Pixelated, 16 colors, hard shadows, fog glued to the camera
Silent Fog	White-grey total fog, very soft shadows, intense light shafts
Dead Channel	Ice-cold broadcast look: blue tint, deep dark, heavy vignette and grain
Old Film	Nostalgic sepia film: desaturated, heavy grain, soft light
Sunless	No sun, no moon — yet the light still falls
Retro Arcade	Y2K retro without the horror: full colors, pixels, barely any fog
Faint Signal	Subtle variant for normal play with a light touch of dread

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⚙️ Settings

All options are adjustable in-game under Shader Pack Settings, grouped into five screens (English & German localization included):

Screen	Options
Atmosphere & Fog	Fog density, fog start distance, sky fog, breathing fog, darkness, night brightness (moonlight), torch brightness, sky gloom, sun/moon toggles & brightness
Shadows & Light Shafts	Shadows on/off, strength, softness, anti-flicker bias, resolution, distance, sun path tilt, light shafts, shaft strength, shadow streak contrast, quality, contact shadows (SSAO) + strength
Retro / PSX	Vertex snap, snap resolution, snap on mobs, pixelation, pixel size, dithering, color depth
Color Grade	Saturation, tint color (sepia / sickly green / cold blue), tint strength, contrast, faded blacks
Analog Overlay	Film grain, vignette, chromatic aberration, scanlines, analog flicker, VHS wobble

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📋 Requirements

Minecraft	1.16.5 – 26.x
Shader loader	Iris (Fabric/Quilt/NeoForge) or Oculus (Forge)
OptiFine	Not required (untested)
GPU	Anything with OpenGL 2.1+ — no PBR, no heavy passes

Install: drop Lost_Tape_v#.#.zip into .minecraft/shaderpacks/ and select it in Options → Video Settings → Shader Packs.

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🔧 How it works

Lost Tape Shader uses the classic OptiFine-format pipeline (GLSL 120) that Iris and Oculus fully support. The gbuffers programs apply lightmap shaping (gamma darkness with a separately-sampled block-light exemption) and optional PSX vertex snapping in clip space. A single composite pass reconstructs view positions from the depth buffer (depthtex1, so glass and water don't block shadows or fog), derives screen-space normals via dFdx/dFdy for acne-free slope-scaled shadow biasing, samples a distortion-warped shadow map, ray-marches the shadow map for volumetric light with Bayer-ordered dithering, applies SSAO, and blends the breathing fog. The final pass does the analog grade: black lift, contrast, desaturation, tint, ordered-dither color quantization, grain, scanlines, flicker, vignette, and chromatic aberration. Dimension folders give the Nether and End their own fog-only composites.