Iris 1.11.7 went out in the early hours of 30 September for Fabric and NeoForge, and the changelog is five words long: fixes a lot of 26.3 bugs. That is not much to go on, but the timing and the context say more than the text does.
Where 26.3 left Iris
Iris reached 26.3 on 15 September with 1.11.5, followed within two hours by 1.11.6 to fix macOS failing to load. A version bump plus an immediate hotfix is the signature of a hard port, and the two weeks since have been the period where everything the initial port missed surfaces in bug reports.
1.11.7 is the sweep of those reports. Shader loaders sit between the game’s renderer and a pack’s own shader programs, which means every rendering change in the base game becomes an Iris compatibility problem, and 26.3 changed a lot of rendering.
The Distant Horizons angle
The clearest evidence of what was broken comes from the other side. Distant Horizons shipped 3.3.3 and 3.3.4 on 29 September, hours before Iris 1.11.7, and its changelogs are specific where Iris’s is not:
- Fix Iris on 26.1.2 and newer having rendering issues, most noticeable with Bliss shaders.
- Fix Iris 26.1.2+ not having access to DH’s lightmap.
- Fix Iris 26.1.2+ having incorrect blend.
- Fix Iris in 26.3 rendering transparent LODs incorrectly when a boat is on the screen.
That last one is the kind of bug that sounds absurd and is entirely plausible: a boat is a transparent-ish entity drawn in a particular pass, and if the pass ordering is wrong it takes the level-of-detail terrain with it. Two mods fixing the same seam within a day of each other is what a working ecosystem looks like, and it is covered in more detail in the Distant Horizons 3.3.4 notes.
Why the changelog is vague
Worth being honest about this. “Fixes a lot of 26.3 bugs” is not a useful release note, and Iris has shipped better ones. The likely reason is that the fixes are a batch of small mixin corrections with no single user-facing story – the sort of thing that reads as twenty lines of commit hashes and communicates nothing.
The practical consequence is that you cannot tell from the changelog whether your specific problem is fixed. The answer is to update and check, which for a shader loader is cheap: swap the jar, load a world, look at it.
What to do if shaders still look wrong
The debugging order that resolves most reports:
- Update the shader pack too. Pack and loader are a matched pair. A pack from before 26.3 will misbehave on a current loader no matter how many bugs the loader fixed.
- Disable Distant Horizons. If the artefact disappears, it is an interaction, not an Iris bug, and both projects are actively working on that seam.
- Turn off Improved Transparency. The OIT path is where most of the recent churn has been.
- Test with the default pack. Iris with no shader pack loaded should render identically to vanilla. If it does not, that is worth reporting.
Most “shaders are broken” reports resolve at step one. The shader pack roundup lists which packs are actually maintained, which is the thing that determines whether step one is available to you.
The 26.4 question
26.4 Snapshot 2 landed the day before this release and moved the cloud rendering path, renamed a core shader file and added two new ones for sky occlusion. None of that is in 1.11.7, which targets 26.3 only.
So the shader ecosystem is now in the familiar split state: a maintained line on the current release, and a snapshot line that does not exist yet. If you want to test the new sky and fog rendering, you will be doing it without shaders for a while.
Update or wait
Update. It is a bug-fix release for the version you are almost certainly on, there is no config migration, and the combination of this plus Distant Horizons 3.3.4 closes a set of problems that have been annoying people for two weeks.
The pattern this fits
Two weeks between a version release and the bug-sweep release is consistent across the shader ecosystem. The initial port makes the loader run; the sweep makes it correct.
What varies is whether a project ships the sweep at all. Plenty of smaller rendering mods ship the port and then go quiet, leaving users on a version that technically supports the game and visibly does not work. Iris shipping 1.11.7 two weeks after 1.11.5 is the healthy version of this cycle.
Reporting usefully
If something is still wrong after updating, the report that gets fixed includes four things: your loader and version, your shader pack and version, whether Distant Horizons is installed, and a screenshot of the artefact with Improved Transparency both on and off.
That last pair is what separates a renderer bug from an OIT bug, and it is the thing most reports leave out.
Images: Sildur’s Vibrant Shaders project gallery.