Some players install BSL or Complementary, enjoy the first sunset, then get tired of the glow around every torch and the haze over every hill. Chocapic13’s Shaders is the usual answer for them. Its author, Choca_13, describes it as a pack with a high quality to performance ratio that scales across a wide range of hardware, and in practice it looks sober: light is warm but not smeared, and blocks keep sharp outlines.
Why it looks cleaner than the glowy packs
Several things in the V9 feature list explain the style. There is a sharpening pass, so block textures do not turn soft after anti-aliasing. Bloom is present but restrained, which is why you see fewer bright rays than in most realistic packs. Shadows use a variable penumbra: crisp right under an object, softer as they stretch away.
The rest is the expected set for a realistic shader:
- day and night cycle with HDR lighting;
- volumetric fog that receives shadows, plus volumetric clouds;
- water with fog, reflections, caustics and refraction;
- screen space global illumination, so light bounces off bright surfaces into nearby shade;
- TAA, and TAAU temporal upscaling in the low-end versions;
- custom Nether and End, depth of field, wavy plants.
One archive, several versions
Chocapic13 V9 is not a single pack with a profile switch. The author released it as an archive marked “Unzip file”, with separate shader packs inside for different quality levels, up to Extreme. That catches people out: if you drop the outer archive into the shaderpacks folder, nothing appears in the list. Unpack it first and copy only the version zip you want.
Start in the middle on a mid-range card and move up or down from there. The very lightest build, called Toaster, lives in a separate project, Chocapic13′ High Performance. Its page says only that preset is available and that the author got around 50 to 60 fps on integrated Intel HD 620 graphics with it.
Settings the author asks for
The project page lists a few requirements that solve most “it looks wrong” reports:
- Update your graphics driver.
- Leave OptiFine’s Shadow Quality at 1.00x and change shadow resolution in the shader options instead.
- Keep Sky on and set Old Lighting to Off or Default.
- Avoid custom sky resource packs; they are usually unsupported.
Choca_13 also states that compatibility with other mods is not supported. The last files are from 2020 and early 2021 (V9 and the V9.1 Extreme betas), so blocks added since then may not wave or reflect the way older ones do.
Loading the pack
The author writes his instructions for OptiFine: V7 and newer need at least OptiFine for 1.12. Install OptiFine for your exact game version, open Video Settings, then Shaders, press Shaders Folder, place the chosen version zip there and pick it from the list.
On Fabric, Iris reads the same zip from Video Settings, Shader Packs. Iris loads most OptiFine-format packs, and Chocapic13 V9 is not on its list of known broken ones. If you would rather have a pack that is still updated for new versions, try Sildur’s Vibrant or the lighter projectLUMA.
