Nova Reimagined
# Nova Reimagined
### REQUIRES COMPANION MODS [NOVA REIMAGINED SNOW](https://modrinth.com/mod/nova-reimagined-snow) AND [SEASON CACHE](https://modrinth.com/mod/season-cache) TO PROPERLY ENABLE FULL SNOW SHADER SYSTEM
**A modified Minecraft shader pack based on Complementary Reimagined by EminGT.**
Nova Reimagined modifies and adds to Complementary Reimagined with a shader-driven surface snow system, cell shaded lighting model, per-time-of-day weather visuals, and more with a curated set of defaults tuned for a stylised, lightly cell-shaded aesthetic.
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_**NOTE:** Should be compatible with Iris 1.6+ and Distant Horizons 2.45b+ unless specific changes break compatibility in the future. Should be compatible with Minecraft 1.21.X, though primarily built for and tested on 1.21.1. The more at-risk compatibility concern would be with the companion mod Nova Reimagined Snow, but that’s also relatively well guarded._
## Features
### Surface Snow System
Nova Reimagined’s centrepiece feature. Snow is painted directly onto terrain, paths, foliage, wood, and structural blocks in snowy biomes using a noise-driven pixel-locked pattern. Coverage fades naturally under tree canopies and near light sources, creating organic melt patterns rather than hard biome boundary lines. Up to four snow texture variants are resolved automatically from your active resource pack stack, so the snow appearance adapts to whatever resource pack you have installed. **[Requires the Nova Reimagined Snow companion mod,](https://modrinth.com/mod/nova-reimagined-snow)** and **[Season Cache.](https://modrinth.com/mod/season-cache)**
### Cell Shaded Lighting
An optional cel-shaded lighting model that quantises block light into discrete bands, giving illuminated areas a stylised, hand-drawn quality. Band count, contrast, and ambient contribution are all tunable, making it possible to dial in anything from a subtle painterly warmth to a more pronounced cartoon look. Works alongside coloured lighting for fully coloured cel-shaded block light.
### Extended Dark Outline System
A configurable dark outline pass that traces the edges of geometry, reinforcing Minecraft’s natural block silhouettes. Outline weight, fade distance, and fade range are all adjustable, letting you control how aggressively outlines appear at distance. Can be combined with the cel-shaded lighting for a cohesive illustrative style.
### Per-Time-of-Day And Per-Time-of-Day Weather Visuals
Dawn/Dusk, Day, and Night all have their own lighting and atmospherics profiles. Rain and storm conditions have fully independent visual profiles for day, dusk, and night. Ambient levels, light intensity, atmospheric fog, border fog brightness, cloud brightness, light warmth, and glare desaturation are all separately tunable across all six weather and time-of-day combinations. This allows storms to feel dramatically different depending on when they hit rather than applying a single flat weather filter over everything.
### Underwater Visuals
Underwater environments have dedicated colour and brightness controls for day, dusk, and night, along with independent settings for water fog, border fog, and light shafts. Water colour, foam intensity, texture detail, and refraction are all configurable, giving full control over how water looks from both above and below the surface.
### Distant Horizons LOD Fade and Overdraw Protection
To make the transition from vanilla render space to Distant Horizons LOD terrain smoothly fade in instead of pop in, LOD fade system with overdraw protection has been implemented and is fully configurable to make it work for your specific needs. This is probably one of the more visually impactful options should you be using Distant Horizons.
### Distant Horizons LOD Custom Texture Application
Similar to the snow shader, grass, stone, sand, and a handful of other block types can have their texture paths added to the configuration file so that the shader uses them to better match distant lands to your vanilla draw distance space. Grass specifically has per-season visual options in the settings to allow you to perfectly match colors across all seasons when using Serene Seasons. Exposure and general texture use options available for all blocks included, and the entire system can be disabled if preferred.
### SMAA Anti-Aliasing
Subpixel Morphological Anti-Aliasing is available alongside TAA, providing sharp edge smoothing with less ghosting on moving geometry than temporal methods alone. SMAA and TAA can be used in combination or independently depending on your preference for sharpness versus stability.
### Alternative Tone Mappers
In addition to the native Complementary tonemapper, Nova Reimagined includes a selection of alternative tonemapping operators. Each operator changes how colour and brightness are mapped to the display, giving meaningfully different looks ranging from filmic contrast curves to flatter, more neutral presentations. The native tonemapper’s brightness, contrast, saturation, and vibrance controls remain available regardless of which operator is selected.
### General Alterations and Additions
Several other minor systems have been alterated or added as well. World Space Reflections and Advanced Color Tracing are fully independent. Depth Blur has been stabilized and modified to help sell visual planes. Atmospheric Fog is now comprised of general, and ground fogs. Cave detection and lighting has been changed. Probably more that my dad brain is forgetting lol. A lot…it’s a lot.
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## Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Do I really need [Nova Reimagined Snow](https://modrinth.com/mod/nova-reimagined-snow) or [Season Cache](https://modrinth.com/mod/season-cache)?
Spoiler
A. Technically, no, but the snow shader will not work as intended without them. If you’re interested in all the other features and don’t care for the snow shader, you can ignore the companion mods but you’ll want to disable all the snow shader toggles and Distant Horizons texture options under the Materials section and Other section of the settings.
Q. What is the performance hit?
Spoiler
A. You can expect similar performance to Complementary Reimagined as most of what’s been added or modified doesn’t add much weight. Full winter scenes with Distant Horizons may be a bit heavier than without, but I wouldn’t expect it to cripple your framerate above not using the snow shader options.
There are several new toggles that can help get the most out of your performance, though, such as choosing where light shafts will render, which parts of the snow shader system to use, Distant Horizons overdraw protection, and more. Inherently built to look good without having to use PBR, you can also leave it and other heavy options off without losing the great visuals.
Q. Do I have to use the dark outline, cell shaded lighting, etc.? Can you toggle them?
Spoiler
A. You don’t have to at all! The outline, lighting, even individual snow shader per block category are exposed so you can make the shader pack work for your taste, your performance goals, and your resource packs. I made sure to expose as many toggles and sliders as I could within reason to put the power in your hands to do what you want and need to in order to get the most out of the shader pack.
Q. What about Voxy?
Spoiler
A. Like all of my mods, they’re born of necessity. At the time of creating this shader pack, Voxy was not compatible with multiplayer and as my mods are made for my server I run for my friends it was left out. By the time Voxy is multiplayer capable I suspect the OpenGL to Vulkan switch will have happened and there will be more than Voxy to try to sort out should forward compatibility continue haha.
Q. Does this work with Serene Seasons or other seasonal mods?
Spoiler
A. The snow shader was actually born of using Serene Seasons and wanting to figure out a way to make use of Complementary’s existing snowy world toggle in a more targeted way. That is to say, it absolutely works with Serene Seasons. It’s really meant specifically for Serene Seasons, though, so if it does work with other seasonal mods it’s an unintended win haha.
To make sure your Distant Horizons LODs change with the seasons, you’ll also want my mod that handles Serene Seasons x Distant Horizons [which you can find here](https://modrinth.com/mod/serene-seasons-x-distant-horizons).
Q. Is this Vanilla friendly?
Spoiler
A. To be honest, as I’m very new to the Minecraft modding scene, I’m still not 100% sure what the agreed upon criteria for being Vanilla Friendly is. To my knowledge it’s some amalgam of visual and functional changes that don’t mess with the vanilla experience or internals. In that sense, I would assume this is vanilla friendly. I set out wanting to make Minecraft still look like Minecraft despite using Alacrity, which is a very much detail heavy resource pack.
Q. What Texture Pack, World Generation, etc. do you use in the screenshots?
Spoiler
A. The main texture/resource pack is Alacrity and a selection of John’s Alacrity Enhanced content (had to do some modifying to get compatibility in check) and a smattering of the usual suspects for animals, animations etc. The world generation was a combination of Larion, Larion Disc World, Lithostitched, WWOO, and accompanying structure/dungeon/accessory mods to round it out.
Q. Are there specific resource packs you’d recommend?
Spoiler
A. While all the effects will work with essentially any pack, there are definitely some that handle things like the dark outline and snow shaders better than others. Alacrity is my personal choice, but Whimscape also works really well!
Q. Any settings you’d recommend that aren’t default?
Spoiler
A. Yes! If your machine can handle it, going from Real-Time Lighting High to Very High can have a meaningful impact in forest scenes especially. Ultra isn’t worth it, though.
Also, if you’re using Distant Horizons you can use its settings to slightly alter its LOD brightness and saturation to better match your vanilla render distance to make for an even more seemless experience. Similarly, in the shader options you can tweak Distant Horizon’s water color to match your vanilla render distance and all but eliminate the visible transition point which makes for great views!
Honestly, as long as you’re using the Cell Lighting, and some form of the Dark Outline, you can choose whatever you want to suit your performance needs without losing too much of the original visual intent so feel free to experiment!
Q. Why do my trees/foliage look weird with the dark outline?
Spoiler
A. Sadly, due to how the dark outline is drawn, and how some blocks are drawn, the dark outline can sometimes not look so great. It’s a combination of the style of leaf/foliage block and the realities of how the line is drawn alongside things like edge detection, and anti aliasing. I tried a few methods, but what I stuck with seemed like the best trade off.
Q. Why is the snow streaky on some of the block types?
Spoiler
A. Depending on how the block is designed, it can result in some streaking behaviour. Some settings might make this effect a bit less noticeable but until I come up with a solution (assuming there is one haha) I can’t offer more than the ability to toggle what gets snow – which is possible in the settings.
Q. Why does the snow-covered ice look dark in Distant Horizons terrain?
Spoiler
A. Unfortunately I never could figure out how to tackle that. Some investigating led to learning it’s upstream (it’s a Distant Horizons problem). I tried painting that ice red using every method I could sort out so I could modify how it looked, even in its broken state, but nothing touches it so I’m not able to do much until the underlying issue is resolved.
Q. I noticed some block types that should probably have snow on them don’t have any. Why is that and can I do anything about it?
Spoiler
A. Odds are those blocks are modded blocks, added content, etc. While I added some common modded blocks to the list, it’s obviously not exhaustive haha. That part of the shader/companion could be added to by those who know what they’re doing (it’s just using block type tags like minecraft:dirt_path etc.) but otherwise I might have to come up with a way to make adding to the list easier for you all in the future when I get some time.
Q. Will you add new Complementary features to this pack in the future should they release them?
Spoiler
A. Maybe. I’m a new dad and have mostly been slamming these mods out during my limited downtime while on the night watch haha. As mentioned elsewhere, the mods I’ve done were mostly in service of my server I run for my friends so while I will try to update and fix when posssible, I can’t promise anything since I have other priorities.
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## Credits
Nova Reimagined is built on top of Complementary Reimagined by EminGT.
Original pack and full credits: https://www.complementary.dev
– **EminGT** – Developer of Complementary Reimagined, the base this pack is built upon
– **Capt Tatsu** – Developer of BSL Shaders, whose generosity made Complementary possible
– **ItsThatNova** – Nova Reimagined modifications and the companion Nova Reimagined Snow mod
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## Requirements
– Minecraft 1.21.x (Java Edition)
– [Iris Shaders](https://modrinth.com/mod/iris) 1.6+
– [Nova Reimagined Snow](https://modrinth.com/mod/nova-reimagined-snow)
– [Season Cache](https://modrinth.com/mod/season-cache)
– [Distant Horizons](https://modrinth.com/mod/distanthorizons) (optional, fully supported)
– [Serene Seasons X Distant Horizons](https://modrinth.com/mod/serene-seasons-x-distant-horizons) (optional, but recommoended if using both SS and DH)
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## Installation
1. Install Iris Shaders
2. Install the Nova Reimagined Snow companion mod
3. Install the Season Cache mod
4. Place the Nova Reimagined shader pack zip in your shaderpacks folder
5. Select it in Iris settings
6. After running the game with Nova Reimagined Snow installed, go to your Minecraft folder > Config folder, and update the compsnow config file with your snow, grass, and block texture paths.
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## Surface Snow Settings
Snow coverage settings are found under **Shader Settings > Other > Surface Snow**:
– **Pixel Size** – Controls the cell size and coverage step count of the snow noise pattern
– **Accent Max Snow Coverage** – Sets the maximum snow opacity on path and accent blocks
– **Accent Melt Patch Scale** – Controls the scale of melt patches on accent blocks
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## License
This pack is distributed under the Complementary License Agreement 1.6.
See `License.txt` for full terms.
Nova Reimagined credits Complementary Reimagined as its Original Pack per section 1.3 of that agreement.
