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Streaking artifacts below Y60 with Distant Horizons #360
Description
Using Distant Horizons with this shader produces streaking artifacts below Y60.
Here's a screenshot:
Holding a map or going underwater prevents the artifacts from happening.
Some more details after debugging with AI:
Environment
Complementary Reimagined: r5.9.3
Distant Horizons: 3.3.0
Iris: 1.11.6
Sodium: 0.9.2
Minecraft: 26.3
Description
Below approximately Y~60, a screen-wide artifact affects lighting and reflection values and streaks across the frame when the camera moves. It is visible in all directions and persists regardless of whether the player is in a cave or open air. It does not occur underwater, and does not occur with Photon shader.
The artifact appears to be a stale data mask written into deferred lighting/PBR colortex buffers by DH's terrain LOD pass (which renders the surface above the player when below sea level).
Likely cause
shaders.properties declares blend modes for dh_water inside the #ifdef DISTANT_HORIZONS block, but dh_terrain has no blend mode declared at all. This leaves the OpenGL blend state for that pass undefined — it inherits whatever state was last active — allowing the DH terrain LOD pass to write stale/incorrect data into colortex buffers that the deferred lighting and reflection composites then read.
Photon avoids this by explicitly setting blend = off on every pass first, then re-enabling blending only on specific colortex slots that need it. Adding blend.dh_terrain = off (and explicit per-slot overrides where needed) to Complementary's DH block should fix this.
Workarounds
None that fully resolve it. Holding a filled map in the main hand partially reduces the artifact (likely alters which depth values are written that frame).
Activity
SpacEagle17 commentedon Sep 18, 2026
Most likely what the AI said is incorrect and it's just an issue which is exclusive to iris 1.11.4+ which changed how depth worked and DH had to adapt. This was a week ago and since there have been some issues
Ranity-Insandom commentedon Sep 19, 2026
Strange, this happens to me but only when I have SPBR enabled. Before I read this, I opened an issue on the DH page that blames it on compatibility with SPBR
Practor009 commentedon Sep 26, 2026
I am having the same issue, ruled out any other potential culprits to this shader:
Same stack versions please see attached F3 menu:
EminGT commentedon Sep 26, 2026
Did you try removing all resource packs?
Ranity-Insandom commentedon Sep 27, 2026
Someone from the DH team said this is a problem with Iris
Practor009 commentedon Sep 27, 2026
Yes, only default resource pack is active during my testing, it's interesting how some clients can't reproduce, removing DH fixes the issue.
EminGT commentedon Sep 28, 2026
Iris needs to fix this. There is something broken behind the shader pipeline
yoboujon commentedon Sep 28, 2026
Checked and between MEDIUM and HIGH quality, the bug disappears, good to know that this bug appears when your holding an item and not hitting with it.
So it could be either one of those:
yoboujon commentedon Sep 28, 2026
okay it is definitely BLOCK_REFLECT_QUALITY, when trying something >1, it starts to flicker
EminGT commentedon Sep 28, 2026
Disabling reflections does hide the problem, but it doesn't fix the underlying problem of Iris with DH doing weird blending for buffer writes behind the scenes. You might get different bugs pop up because of it.
SpacEagle17 commentedon Sep 28, 2026
Today in the iris discord the DH dev commented about some more bug fixes
https://discord.com/channels/774352792659820594/774354522361299006/1554112671123513415