Modern lighting and post-processing on top of Minecraft's own Vulkan renderer. With every effect off it matches vanilla pixel for pixel.
Overview
Unlike traditional shader packs that wrap around legacy OpenGL pipelines, Helion runs natively on Minecraft's Vulkan rendering architecture.
With all effects turned off, Helion matches vanilla Minecraft pixel-for-pixel. When enabled, Helion layers modern post-processing and rendering stages on top of the world: Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion, natural adaptive bloom, tone mapping, atmospheric lighting, and block shadows.
Features
- 🌑 Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion (GTAO): Soft, natural contact shadows in corners, under stairs, fences, and around mobs. Light sources and emissive blocks stay bright.
- 💡 Physically-Inspired Bloom: Soft, cinematic glow around torches, lava, lanterns, and beacons that naturally adapts to daylight and darkness.
- 🎨 PBR Neutral & Filmic Tone Mapping: Preserves original Minecraft textures and colors while smoothly compressing bright highlights.
- 🗡️ Contrast Adaptive Sharpening: Restores crisp texture clarity on high-resolution displays without halos.
- 🌀 Temporal Anti-Aliasing (Experimental): Smooth block edges and calm, shimmer-free distant textures.
- ☀️ Physical Atmosphere & Dynamic Shadows (Experimental): Atmospheric scattering model for natural golden sunsets, paired with real sun and moon block shadows.
- 🔮 HDR Lighting & Geometry Buffer (Experimental): Unconstrained emissive lights with per-pixel normals and separate block and sky lighting.
- ⚙️ Arkea-Powered Configuration: Press H to toggle Helion instantly. Configure all settings in-game with Vanilla, Balanced, Quality and Experimental presets, before/after previews and a real-time GPU impact meter.
- 🛡️ Safe by Design: On OpenGL, with Sodium or Iris, or after a rendering error, Helion steps aside and the game keeps running with vanilla graphics.
- 🔍 Debug Mode: Every Helion value on screen and in
logs/helion-debug.jsonl, GPU time per render stage, and a pixel-by-pixel parity check against vanilla.
For full technical and player details, see the Helion Feature Guide.
Requirements
| Requirement | Supported Version |
|---|---|
| Minecraft | 26.3 |
| Loader | NeoForge 26.3.0.51-beta or newer |
| Java | 25 |
| Graphics API | Vulkan (Video Settings → Graphics API → Prefer Vulkan) |
| Side | Client only (safe to join any multiplayer server) |
| Required Library | Arkea 0.1 or newer |
Compatibility & Troubleshooting
- Server Safe: 100% client-side. Safe to join any vanilla or modded server.
- Sodium / Iris: Helion automatically deactivates itself when Sodium or Iris is detected to prevent rendering conflicts.
- OpenGL Fallback: If launched under OpenGL, Helion remains inactive and provides instructions on enabling Vulkan.
- Startup Crash Workaround: If the game closes immediately on launch, set
earlyWindowControl = falseinconfig/fml.toml. - Compatibility List: See which mods, shaders and resource packs work with Helion on the compatibility page.
- Crash Helper: Paste your crash report into the crash helper to see known fixes.
Community & Contributing
- Website: lureid.com/mods/helion with the wiki, roadmap and support.
- Found a bug or have a suggestion? Read SUPPORT.md or open an issue on our Issue Tracker.
- Want to compile or contribute code? Read CONTRIBUTING.md.
Not an official Minecraft product. Not approved by or associated with Mojang or Microsoft.