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The Reflections and Materials page

By Ryleigh Newman · Published 19 September 2026

The Reflections and Materials page in Rockstar Shaders has 7 settings: the ray-traced reflection switch, the screen-space trace, two glass switches and three sliders for metals. Ray-traced reflections is restart-only; the other six are tune settings, applied when you leave the page with Done, which rebuilds the shader pipelines in about a second.

I am Ryleigh Newman and I made Rockstar Shaders because the reflections I wanted in Minecraft, a pool that shows the tower behind you instead of a smear of the screen, only existed in packs made for Windows, and I play on a Mac. This page is what each of the seven settings does, what reflects and what does not yet, and the measurements I have.

Download free (1.0.0) Modrinth (pending)Minecraft 26.3, Fabric, macOS on Apple silicon. Install guide. Releases and bug reports on GitHub.

Two ways a reflection is made

A reflection in this pack comes from one of two traces, and a water pixel uses both. The screen-space trace marches through what the screen already shows and mirrors it; it is cheap, and it knows nothing outside the frame. The ray trace runs in the Metal side-car: one mirror ray per water pixel, jittered into a cone by the surface roughness, shaded with block and sky light at the point it hits, with the cloud deck carried along the reflected ray. It covers what is off screen or hidden: the tower behind you, the sky above the top edge, the far bank behind a near one. On a Mac the Vulkan driver exposes no ray query, so the trace goes through VK_EXT_metal_objects to Metal, and that is what needs Apple Silicon. Water, metal and ice get the ray trace. Glass gets the screen trace and the sky.

Ray-traced reflections

Ray-traced reflections is on by default and restart-only. It traces reflection rays for water, metal and ice through the side-car. Turning it off is not a saving: in the sunset-bay pose on the M4 Max, everything on was 27.9 ms a frame and ray-traced reflections off was 29.3, because the fallback costs more than the trace. At my window size, 1706 by 1966, the resolve pass that turns the traced hits into the picture took 1.4 ms of that frame. If the side-car is not available, the pack still renders with the traced water reflection missing, and the log carries "Ray-traced reflections disabled:" with the reason. Whether your own body appears in the traced reflection is Player in reflections on Lighting and Shadows, and that feature is built but not yet shown in a capture.

The screen trace

Screen trace steps is the number of coarse march steps in the screen-space trace, 28 by default, from 8 to 48 in steps of 4; fewer is cheaper. At 1706 by 1966 the SSR pass took 1.4 ms of the sunset frame on the M4 Max. Water has its own switch for whether it uses the screen trace at all, Screen reflections on the Water page, and turning that off took the water pass from about 8.7 to 7.81 ms at that size. The two are easy to confuse: this slider sets the step count of the trace wherever it runs, and that switch decides whether water asks for it.

Glass

Glass reflections is on by default: windows and panes reflect the sky and the scene. Glass screen trace is on by default: a window mirrors what is in front of it, through the screen trace. What glass does not do by default is ask for a traced ray. A pane never requests one from the side-car unless the Advanced key glassRtReflect is on, and it ships off, so a pane can only mirror the sky and what the screen already shows. Connected glass, which removes the frame between neighboring panes, is on Textures and Details, and stained glass tinting the sunlight that passes through it belongs to the shadow cascades on Lighting and Shadows.

Metals

Gold and iron are near-mirrors. Gold roughness is 0.07 by default and Iron roughness is 0.10, both from 0.02 to 0.5 in steps of 0.01, and lower is more mirror-like. Metal texture shade is how far a block's own texture may darken the metal's mirror: 0.82 by default, from 0.3 to 1 in steps of 0.02, and 1 is a flat mirror. Ice is handled by the water engine as a dielectric slab and gets the ray trace along with the water; there is no slider for it on this page.

What reflects, and what does not yet

• Water, metal and ice: the ray trace plus the screen trace. Far water mirrors the shore out to about 240 blocks.
• The cloud deck: reflected in water and ice when Clouds in reflections on Sky and Clouds is on, which it is by default.
• Glass: the sky and the screen trace only, no traced ray by default.
• Custom skies from a resource pack: drawn behind the cloud deck but not yet reflected in water or in the screen trace.
• Your own body: in the traced water reflection when Player in reflections is on, built and self-tested but not yet shown in a capture.

This is a 1.0 release measured on one machine, and settings can move between builds. If a reflection looks wrong rather than missing from this list, that is a report I want, with a screenshot; the checklist is on Reporting a bug.

Every setting on the page

A tune value equal to the shipped default is stored as no override, and Reset to defaults on the front page forgets every override; the restart-only switch keeps its value. The Advanced keys named on this page, glassRtReflect among them, are on Advanced.

Download free (1.0.0) Modrinth (pending)Minecraft 26.3, Fabric, macOS on Apple silicon. Install guide. Releases and bug reports on GitHub.

About the author. Ryleigh Newman wrote Rockstar Shaders and every page on this site. Facts about other packs and programs come from their own sites, with the date they were read. More about the project.

Related

• The Water page
• The Lighting and Shadows page
• The Sky and Clouds page
• The Textures and Details page
• The Advanced page, tune keys and the config file

Questions