5 best Minecraft shaders to use in March 2023

Minecraft has a unique visual style, but players sometimes wish to enhance it. This is exactly why shaders are so popular among the community, and they come in many different forms.

Using several post-processing effects and other graphical changes, shaders can completely revitalize how players look at their world in Minecraft. Lights and colors can become more vivid, while rays can trace and scatter over blocks. Some shaders also introduce intriguing and unique effects for players who want something unorthodox.

If players are new to Minecraft or simply want to get started with shaders in general, there are a few awesome options that are great for overall visual improvement.

Note: This list is subjective and reflects the opinions of the writer

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SEUS Renewed and other amazing shaders for improved visuals in Minecraft 1.19+

1) BSL Shaders

A savanna biome rendered in BSL Shaders (Image via BSLshaders.com)

One of the mainstay shader packs in Minecraft for years, BSL shaders continues to go strong in 2023. The pack comes with volumetric lightning, real-time shadow rendering, and customizable water and skyboxes.

Players can further tweak BSL with additional effects like depth of field, motion blur, specular mapping, world curvature, and more. There are also a ton of settings that allow players to fine-tune their visual experience or reduce the performance impact on their CPU and GPU. This makes BSL a great general-use shader pack for most players.

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2) SEUS Renewed

SEUS creates a beautiful scene when combined with a high-resolution Minecraft texture pack (Image via SonicEther.com)

Long considered the primary rival to BSL shaders in the Minecraft community, Sonic Ether's Unbelievable Shaders (SEUS) is a gorgeous set of shaders to behold. The latest mainline iteration is known as SEUS Renewed and includes even more visual flourishes compared to the original pack.

Thanks to its focus on traditional rasterization-based rendering, SEUS Renewed can provide vastly improved visuals when it comes to post-processing, light, shadow, and bloom effects with a relatively minimal performance impact.

If Minecraft players want to push the envelope even further, they may want to take a look at SEUS PTGI. This experimental version uses custom software rendering that can create ray tracing and other great effects even if a player doesn't have an RTX graphics card.

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3) Iris Shaders

An open-source shader project aiming for improved visuals without sacrificing compatibility with many different mods, Iris Shaders is impressive, highly adaptable, and customizable.

Thanks to its bottom-up construction, Iris Shaders is incredibly easy and quick to update. Players won't have to wait around for the latest release each time Minecraft is updated.

Courtesy of its leaning towards compatibility, Iris Shaders can be used with a wide swath of mods, including Optifine and Sodium, without causing a substantial performance hit.

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4) Arc Shaders

Arc Shaders are a go-to option for realism in Minecraft (Image via Null5112/CurseForge)

If players are angling for a more realistic visual aesthetic for their world, combining Arc Shaders with a high-resolution texture pack is one of the best ways to do so. This pack is compatible with both Optifine and Iris. Although it's in ongoing development, the results have been spectacular.

With features like HDR lighting, volumetric fog and smoke, screen-space reflections, and even varied exposure, Arc Shaders can be a fantastic asset for realistic visuals.

The pack has also undergone plenty of updates to minimize its performance drain. While players will still need a solid machine to handle these shaders at their peak, many of the features can be altered or deactivated to reduce the impact on the CPU and graphics card.

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5) Insanity Shaders

While many shaders emphasize beautiful light effects and serene post-processing, Insanity Shaders focus on creating a dismal, dark, and even spooky environment.

Created with horror mods in mind, Insanity Shaders are all about instilling a sense of dread. Even better, this pack has a very minuscule performance footprint and has benchmarked at 60 FPS and higher, even on older GeForce GTX 1000 series graphics cards.

Obviously, the vibe this pack gives off won't fit every player. However, for those who love a more bleak feel to their worlds, Insanity Shaders should be an option worth looking into, at the very least.