Vanadium Mod

Vanadium Mod is a Vulkan-native shader pack loader for Minecraft Java Edition, designed to provide a modern, stable, and production-ready SPIR-V shader pipeline. It is fully compatible with Fabric (Quilt-friendly) and integrates seamlessly with VulkanMod.

Vanadium allows developers and players to run precompiled SPIR-V shaders without interfering with existing GLSL shader ecosystems (including Iris .zip shaders).

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Features

🔹 Vulkan SPIR-V Shader Pipeline Load and bind vertex, fragment, and compute shaders in Minecraft via Vulkan.

🔹 Hot-Reloading Change shader packs without restarting Minecraft. Live updates with automatic rollback on errors.

🔹 Shader Configuration UI

• Menu: Options → Video Settings → Vanadium Shaders
• View shader metadata: Name, Author, Description, Version, Supported Minecraft version
• Icon preview for each shader pack
• Enable/Disable packs and reload shaders live

🔹 Compute Shader Support Execute GPU compute shaders safely where supported.

🔹 Safe Fallback Automatic fallback to the default Vulkan renderer if shaders fail to load.

🔹 Iris-Safe Operation

• .mcshader packs are fully isolated
• Does not parse or modify .zip shaderpacks
• No conflicts with Iris or other GLSL shader loaders

🔹 Developer-Friendly Logging

• Shader compilation and pipeline errors logged
• Hot-reload diagnostics

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Shader Pack Format (.mcshader)

Vanadium uses precompiled SPIR-V shaders packaged in .mcshader ZIP archives.

Required Files:

Metadata JSON (vanadium.json)

{
  "name": "Example Shader",
  "author": "AuthorName",
  "description": "A simple SPIR-V shader pack.",
  "icon": "icon.png",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "minecraft_version": "1.19+"
}

Shader Modules

• Vertex shader: shader.vert.spv
• Fragment shader: shader.frag.spv
• Optional compute shader: shader.comp.spv
• Optional geometry shader: shader.geom.spv

Vanadium ignores .zip shaderpacks to avoid conflicts with Iris.

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Installation

1. Install Minecraft Java Edition.
2. Install Fabric (Quilt optional).
3. Install VulkanMod.
4. Place Vanadium Mod.jar in your mods/ folder.
5. Place your .mcshader shader packs into the /shaderpacks/ folder.
6. Launch Minecraft.
7. Navigate to:

Options → Video Settings → Vanadium Shaders

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Usage

• Select an active shader pack from the UI.
• Click Reload to hot-reload changes.
• Toggle compute shaders if supported by GPU.
• Use the logs for debugging shader compilation issues.

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Example Shader Pack Structure

myshader.mcshader/
├── vanadium.json
├── shader.vert.spv
├── shader.frag.spv
├── shader.comp.spv  (optional)
├── icon.png         (optional)

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Mod Compatibility

• Compatible with Fabric, Quilt (if supported)
• Renderer: VulkanMod required
• Safe to use alongside Iris, Sodium, Lithium, and Phosphor
• Does not interfere with .zip shaderpacks

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Contributing

Vanadium is open-source. Contributions are welcome!

• Follow the existing modular architecture.
• Keep Vulkan resource handling correct.
• Ensure .mcshader packs remain Iris-safe.
• Use the provided Gradle setup for building and testing.

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License

Vanadium Mod is licensed under LGPL 3.0.

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Contact

For support or questions, open an issue in the GitHub repository: https://github.com/AnujaGajaweera/Vanadium