If you’ve played Minecraft for a while, you may be eager to customize the look and feel of your world. Two popular ways you can do this are texture packs and shaders. If you’ve ever been curious, you might ask yourself what is the difference between shaders and texture packs? and what are they anyway?
In this article let’s lets answer those questions. Define how they work and why you should give them a try!
Table of Contents
Diffrence between shaders and texture packs?
The main difference is that texture packs simply overlay pre-rendered images onto the blocks in your Minecraft world.
Whereas shaders are far more complex as they dynamically change various graphical settings by dictating how the world’s objects will behave in response to light, movement, position, etc.
Let us look at what these things are in more detail to understand how they really work.
What are texture packs?
Texture packs are a set of pre-rendered images that will be “stuck” onto the surface of your blocks.
This gives your blocks a different texture even though the block itself hasn’t changed any of its properties. Think of the blocks in the world as empty, colorless cubes. Texture packs are the surfaces that will be placed onto each side of these blocks.
They come in packs or packages, so one texture pack contains the textures (pre-rendered images) for specific blocks in Minecraft. A great example of this is changing the cloud textures in-game.
What are shaders?
Shaders are scripts of code that optimize and enhance the overall graphics of your game dynamically.
Think of shaders as a “behind the scenes puppet master” that controls and tweaks the visual look of the game dynamically and in far more detail than just adding a texture.
These scripts do things such as determine how light will behave in-game, how objects change color, reflect light, how the water looks and moves, etc.
A great example is standing near a light source. With shaders on, the glow of the light will appear more realistic. Causing objects to cast a shadow dynamically depending on where you’re standing.
Ultimately it means that you can use shaders without textures for a more realistic look even with Vanilla Minecraft (as seen below).
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is often common to use both texture packs and shaders to achieve the optimal graphical performance and look of your Minecraft world.
These can require quite a bit of your machine’s recourse so be sure you can confidently run them before adding them to your game.
Here’s an example with both textures and shaders added to the game.
You can find more information on the different shaders, texture packs, and how installation and setup works here.
Enjoy the view!
