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The Sky and Clouds page

By Ryleigh Newman · Published 19 September 2026

The Sky and Clouds page in Rockstar Shaders has 16 settings, and they cover the sun, the sunset band, the night sky and the cloud deck. Every one is a tune setting, applied when you leave the page with Done, which rebuilds the shader pipelines in about a second. Nothing here needs a restart.

I am Ryleigh Newman and I made Rockstar Shaders because the shader packs I wanted were made for Windows and I play on a Mac. The defaults below are the shipped ones in 1.0, and the Advanced page is the ground truth if a number here ever disagrees with your screen.

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

How the sky is drawn

The sky is an analytic atmosphere: Rayleigh scattering for the blue, Mie scattering for the haze, with the sun as the key light for everything under it. The sun and moon sprites are vanilla's own, drawn by the pack's sky pass from the game's atlas at vanilla's size and orientation. The sunrise and sunset bands, the stars, the Milky Way, the nebulae, the aurora and the moon's glow are defaults in the sky header, and the settings on this page override them. The final composite also lifts a gray noon sky toward azure with a small color grade; that grade has no switch here. Custom skies from an OptiFine-format resource pack draw behind the cloud deck, and how those are read is on Resource packs.

The sun and the sunset

Square sun is on by default and gives you the original Minecraft sun, a square with a soft halo. Off is a round disc. Sun size is the half-width of that sun in view-space units, 0.15 by default, from 0.06 to 0.30 in steps of 0.01.

Sunset glow is the colored band along the horizon at sunrise and sunset, on by default. Sunset strength sets how strong those colors are: 0.55 by default, from 0 to 1.5 in steps of 0.05. Both pairs apply on Done, so a sunset can be tuned while it is happening.

The night sky

Stars is on by default and Star brightness is 0.20, from 0.05 to 0.60 in steps of 0.01. Milky Way is the brightness of the band across the night sky: 0.022 by default, from 0 to 0.08 in steps of 0.002, and 0 removes it. Nebulae are four colored nebulae, and they ship off, at 0; the slider runs up to 0.30 in steps of 0.01 if you want them. Aurora draws the aurora over cold biomes at night and is on by default. Moon glow is the glow around the moon, 5 by default, from 0 to 10 in steps of 0.5. It also washes out the faint stars, so for a dense star field on a bright moon, lower the glow or raise the star brightness.

The clouds

Blocky clouds is on by default: the original square cloud deck, lit by the same atmosphere that lights the sun. Off switches to a volumetric cumulus. The deck is marched through, not painted as a flat layer, and four settings control the march. Cloud opacity is the optical depth through one blocky cloud cell, 9 by default, from 1 to 12 in steps of 0.5; lower shows the sky through the deck. Cloud march steps is the number of samples along a view ray through the deck, 96 by default, from 16 to 128 in steps of 8; fewer is faster and blurrier at the horizon. Cloud light steps is the number of samples toward the sun from each of those cloud samples, 4 by default, from 1 to 6, and it sets how sharply a cloud shades itself. Cloud coverage is the mean sky cover in clear weather, 0.42 by default, from 0.10 to 0.80 in steps of 0.02. Rain and thunder push the coverage toward overcast on their own, so this slider sets the fair-weather sky, not the storm.

What the clouds cost, and where they reflect

The cloud march runs one pixel in four per frame over 8-pixel tiles and reprojects the rest, which is how 96 steps stay affordable. At my window size, 1706 by 1966, the clouds pass took 1.9 ms of a sunset frame on the M4 Max, the one machine this release has been measured on. If you need the milliseconds, the two step counts are the settings to lower; the pairs the code's own quality ladder uses below 96 and 4 are 64 and 3, 40 and 2, and 24 and 1, and I have not timed each of them.

Clouds in reflections is on by default and reflects the cloud deck in water and ice, not just the clear sky. The ray-traced water reflection carries the clouds along the reflected ray, so the deck overhead is the deck in the lake. Custom skies from a resource pack are the exception: they draw behind the deck but are not yet reflected in water or in the screen-space trace. The rest of the water's reflection settings are on Water and Reflections and Materials.

Every setting on the page

A value equal to the shipped default is stored as no override, and Reset to defaults on the front page forgets every override at once. To watch the sky while you move a slider, See-through on the front page fades the menu down, and holding F1 on any settings page hides it completely (Keys and shortcuts).

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 Fog and Volumetrics page
• The Foliage and Weather page
• Resource packs: the OptiFine features that work without OptiFine
• Quality settings: what ships, and what to lower first

Questions