Shrimple
by Null
A simple, lightweight shader focused on colored block light and clean visuals. Shrimple is designed for Iris and prioritizes performance while adding meaningful visual improvements.
What Shrimple looks like in-game
The first tile is the reason this pack exists. Coloured lighting normally forces a shader into the demanding tier, and getting it onto a card with a single gigabyte of memory meant cutting everything expensive from the rest of this list. What remains is deliberately ordinary, and that is the trade: five conventional effects paying for one that packs three times its price usually cannot afford.
Shrimple ships 6 headline effects. 6 of the 6 previews below are cut from screenshots Shrimple publishes of itself rather than illustrated by us. For every effect we searched the pack's gallery for the frame where it shows most plainly, then cropped the region where the effect actually happens. The uncut frame shown above is from the same gallery, so any detail here can be traced back to the scene it belongs to.
Colored lighting
This is the whole point of the pack. Torches burn orange into the room, lava reads red on the walls near it, and a sea lantern turns the water above it blue.
Shadows
Sun and moon cast real shadows, kept deliberately cheap so the coloured lighting has room to run on a card with a single gigabyte of memory.
Bloom
Bright sources bleed into the pixels around them, which does double duty here by making each light's own colour easier to read at a distance.
Enhanced water
Water gets depth and ripples instead of a flat plane, and with coloured light underneath it a lantern below the surface actually shows.
Waving vegetation
Vegetation picks up one shared breeze so fields move as one surface, an effect chosen because it costs almost nothing on the hardware this pack targets.
That is a Shrimple frame showing the vegetation involved. Motion only exists between successive frames, so what you see is the scene rather than the movement in it.
Custom sky
The sky is rebuilt with a gradient and stars of its own, held as light as everything else Null trimmed to keep this in the low tier.
Compatibility
What you need to run Shrimple
An overview of Shrimple
Coloured block lighting is normally what pushes a shader into the demanding tier, because tracking a colour per light source and letting it spill onto nearby surfaces is work the renderer has to redo constantly. Shrimple's whole reason for existing is that Null got it running on a GTX 750 with 1 GB of VRAM.
The result is that a base lit by torches is warm and one lit by sea lanterns is cold, lava reads red on the walls near it, and interiors stop being uniformly grey. Vanilla treats every light source as the same white; this pack gives each one its own character, and on hardware this modest that single change does more than any amount of bloom would.
Everything expensive is left out on purpose: no volumetric clouds, no depth of field, no path tracing, no PBR pipeline. What remains is shadows, bloom, enhanced water, waving vegetation and a custom sky around the lighting. It is Iris only, so Fabric or Quilt with the Iris mod is a hard requirement, and it covers Minecraft 1.16.5 to 1.21.4.
What Shrimple changes
Shrimple exists to get one expensive feature onto cheap hardware. Five ordinary effects are paying for one that normally costs far more. It repaints nothing and changes the following about how the world is lit:
- Colored lighting: torches burn orange into the room, lava reads red on the walls near it, and a sea lantern turns the water above it blue.
- Shadows: sun and moon cast real shadows, kept deliberately cheap so the coloured lighting keeps the budget it needs on a 1 GB card.
- Bloom: bright sources bleed into the pixels around them, which here also makes each light's own colour easier to read from a distance.
- Enhanced water: water gets depth and ripples instead of a flat plane, and with coloured light beneath it a submerged lantern actually shows.
- Waving vegetation: plants pick up a shared breeze so fields move as one surface, chosen because it costs almost nothing at this level.
- Custom sky: a replacement sky arrives with its own gradient and star field, kept lightweight to match everything else holding this pack in the low tier.
- Overall direction: the cheapest route on this site to a world where light sources have their own colour, with everything else kept deliberately plain.
Strengths and trade-offs
| Strength | Excellent colored lighting |
| Strength | Very lightweight |
| Strength | Clean code and design |
| Strength | Iris-optimized |
| Trade-off | Iris only, no OptiFine support |
| Trade-off | Fewer effects than heavier packs |
How to install Shrimple
- 1Install Fabric or Quilt for your Minecraft version and add the Iris Shaders mod. Shrimple is Iris only and OptiFine cannot load it at all.
- 2Download the Shrimple .zip by way of the official link above and keep it as an archive.
- 3Bring Minecraft up on the Iris profile, then move through Options into Video Settings and open Shader Packs.
- 4Open Shader Pack Folder takes you straight to the right directory. Copy the archive in and go back to the menu.
- 5Select Shrimple from the list and press Apply. It compiles quickly, which is one of the advantages of a pack this small. After that, go and stand in a room lit by torches to see what the pack actually bought you.
This pack is Iris only, so an OptiFine installation cannot load it at all. Fabric or Quilt with the Iris mod is the requirement, not a preference, and it is the single most common reason someone reports that the pack does not appear in their list.
Running Shrimple smoothly
Shrimple is a low-impact pack, and its whole claim is that coloured lighting does not have to be expensive. Null keeps the code lean enough that a card which struggles with a medium-tier shader will hold a comfortable frame rate here.
The stated baseline is a GTX 750 with 1 GB on the card and 2 GB in the machine. Getting per-source coloured light onto that hardware is unusual: it is normally the feature that pushes a pack two tiers up, not one that runs at the bottom of the range.
Version coverage takes in Minecraft 1.16.5 to 1.21.4 and is Iris only, so Fabric or Quilt with the Iris mod is a requirement rather than a preference. An OptiFine installation cannot load it at all, which is worth checking before you plan around it.
Because the cost is modest, most people can raise render distance or add an HD texture pack without dropping below a smooth frame rate. If frames do get tight, the light propagation range is the setting that gives the most back.
Filed under
What to turn down first in Shrimple
Shrimple is already lean, so the sliders are about protecting the one effect that makes it special.
- 1
Render distance: outside the shader menu and still the biggest lever on the hardware this pack targets.
- 2
Shadow quality: the only real cost inside the pack, and lowering it barely shows at this scale.
- 3
Coloured lighting radius: the last thing to reduce. It is why you installed this rather than something plainer.
How many people run Shrimple?
Two million installs for a pack whose selling point is a single effect, coloured lighting, on a card as old as a GTX 750. Its follower count is high for its size, which fits a pack people keep installed rather than sample once.
| Downloads of Shrimple on Modrinth | 2,024,932 on the maker's page |
|---|---|
| People following Shrimple for updates | 1,083 |
| Last Shrimple release by the author | 8 December 2024 |
| Where Shrimple sits on this site | 18 of 26 packs we could count, see the full ranking |
The Shrimple figures above were counted on 21 August 2026. Modrinth is the only platform with an open counter for Shrimple, so anyone downloading it elsewhere is not in this number.
Where Shrimple sits in our shortlists
Coloured lighting at the lowest budget on the site, so it appears wherever cheap and current are the requirements:
Ready to install Shrimple?
Iris is required and OptiFine will not do. Our walkthrough handles Fabric plus the Iris mod as a single setup.
Installation GuideSomewhere to run Shrimple
Shrimple gives you coloured light on hardware that cannot afford much else, which makes it the pack for the friend whose laptop always keeps them out. A shared world only works if everyone can actually load it.
Shrimple loads into your client through Iris and asks nothing of the server. Your friend on the weak laptop needs their own copy, and the world you all connect to is the thing that has to exist first.
Set up a world for ShrimpleCode GUIDE5 is ours, and it applies to a Shrimple world from the link above.Last updated . This page is rebuilt when its own figures change, not on every deploy.