Soft Voxels Lite
by RRe36
A lighter take on voxel-based lighting. Provides colored block lighting and soft shadows with moderate performance impact, bridging the gap between lightweight and high-end shaders.
About Soft Voxels Lite
Voxel lighting normally means ultra-tier hardware. Soft Voxels Lite is RRe36 asking how much of it survives being made cheap, and the answer turns out to be most of what you actually notice: coloured block light and coloured shadows, computed from a voxel model, running on a GTX 1050 with 2 GB of VRAM.
What is missing is accuracy. There is no full traced global illumination here, so light does not bounce through the scene the way it does in a heavier voxel pack; the lighting is a model of the effect rather than the computation behind it. Against the three tiers of hardware that saves, most players will take the trade without hesitating.
Coloured shadows are the clearest sign the pack is doing real work: light through stained glass or ice keeps its colour on the way down instead of turning neutral. It is Iris only on Minecraft 1.19 to and including 1.20.1, and the options are deliberately limited, being the lite version of a larger idea. Kappa, from the same author, is where the depth of configuration lives.
Soft Voxels Lite effects, shown
This set is a demonstration that voxel lighting survives being made cheap. The first two tiles are what you are paying for, and both normally live three hardware tiers above where this pack runs. What was traded away is accuracy rather than the effect itself: light does not bounce through the scene the way it does in a full voxel pack, but it still carries colour and still turns corners.
Soft Voxels Lite ships 6 headline effects. Nothing below was drawn for this page. 6 of the 6 previews are crops from Soft Voxels Lite's own screenshots: for every effect we chose the published frame where it is easiest to make out and cut out the part where it actually takes place. The whole screenshot above the article comes from the same set, so any detail here can be seen back in context.
Voxel-based lighting
Light sources are voxelised so their colour spills around corners and down corridors, and getting that onto a 2 GB card is what this pack is for.
Colored shadows
Light through stained glass or ice keeps its colour on the way down, so the shadow underneath is tinted rather than neutral grey.
Soft shadows
A shadow's edge blurs as it travels away from the block that casts it, which keeps the voxel lighting from looking pasted onto a hard-edged world.
Bloom
A glow around bright sources, kept cheap on purpose so the budget stays with the voxel lighting that gives the pack its name.
Enhanced water
Water gains depth and ripples, and with coloured light reaching into it a lantern under the surface actually reads as one.
Custom sky
The sky is rebuilt with a gradient and stars of its own, kept simple in line with the lite framing of everything else here.
Soft Voxels Lite against vanilla Minecraft
Soft Voxels Lite brings voxel lighting down three hardware tiers from where it normally lives. What was traded away in the process is accuracy rather than the effects themselves. Textures stay untouched; the lighting changes as follows:
- Voxel-based lighting: light sources are voxelised so their colour spills around corners and down corridors, on a card with 2 GB of memory.
- Colored shadows: light through stained glass or ice keeps its colour on the way down, so the shadow underneath is tinted rather than neutral grey.
- Soft shadows: shadow outlines lose definition as they move away from the block casting them, keeping the voxel lighting from sitting on a hard-edged world.
- Bloom: a glow around bright sources, kept cheap on purpose so the budget stays with the voxel lighting the pack is named for.
- Enhanced water: water gains depth and ripples, and with coloured light reaching into it a lantern below the surface reads as one.
- Custom sky: a rebuilt sky graded to match, so the light in the world and the light in the sky agree instead of pulling in different directions.
- Overall direction: most of what voxel lighting gives you, at a fraction of what it normally costs, with accuracy as the thing traded away.
Loaders Soft Voxels Lite runs on
Soft Voxels Lite system requirements
Baseline card: GTX 1050 / RX 560. Meters are scaled against a 12 GB VRAM / 32 GB RAM reference build.
What Soft Voxels Lite does well
- Colored block light at reasonable cost
- Clean visual style
- Good compromise
- Modern approach
Cons
- Iris only
- Less accurate than full voxel GI
- Limited configuration options
How to install Soft Voxels Lite
- 1Install Fabric or Quilt with the Iris Shaders mod, and use a Minecraft client between 1.19 and 1.20.1. This pack is Iris only.
- 2Download the Soft Voxels Lite .zip using the page named above and leave it zipped.
- 3Run Minecraft on the Iris profile. Options, then Video Settings, then Shader Packs is the route through the menus.
- 4Press Open Shader Pack Folder and move the archive into the directory that Minecraft opens.
- 5Select Soft Voxels Lite and press Apply. The options here are deliberately limited, so there is little left to decide afterwards. Then find some stained glass, which is where the coloured shadows show most clearly.
Iris only, and targeting Minecraft 1.19 through 1.20.1, so an older client is outside its range. The options here are deliberately limited compared with RRe36's larger packs, so once it is loaded there is genuinely little left to decide, which is the point of the lite framing.
Soft Voxels Lite performance notes
Soft Voxels Lite is a medium-impact pack, and the interesting part is that it does voxel lighting at that price at all. RRe36 traded accuracy rather than the effect itself, which is how three hardware tiers were saved without losing the coloured light entirely.
The hardware it assumes is a GTX 1050 or RX 560 with 2 GB on the GPU and 4 GB of system memory. Compared with the 6 GB that a full voxel pack asks for, that is the whole argument for choosing the lite version.
The versions it handles are Minecraft 1.19 to and including 1.20.1 on Iris only. The range is narrow because the voxel work targets recent Iris rather than reaching back to versions where those capabilities did not exist.
Options are deliberately limited, which fits a pack framed as the lite version of a larger idea. If you want depth of configuration on the same author's work, Kappa is where it lives, at a considerably higher cost.
Tags
What to turn down first in Soft Voxels Lite
The lite in the name is doing real work: this is a voxel-lit pack squeezed into a mid-range budget, so it has less slack than its neighbours.
- 1
Voxel range: how far the light model reaches. Reducing it is the main saving and shows up mainly in large open rooms.
- 2
Shadow softness: cheap to lower, and coloured shadows keep most of their effect at lower quality.
- 3
Enhanced water: the last saving worth taking before the pack stops being what you installed.
How many people run Soft Voxels Lite?
Half a million installs for the lite version of a much heavier pack, on a version range that ends at 1.20.1. It is the only pack in the medium tier doing voxel lighting, which is a small audience by definition.
| Downloads of Soft Voxels Lite on Modrinth | 564,463 on the maker's page |
|---|---|
| People following Soft Voxels Lite for updates | 271 |
| Last Soft Voxels Lite release by the author | 12 June 2023 |
| Where Soft Voxels Lite sits on this site | 24 of 26 packs we could count, see the full ranking |
The Soft Voxels Lite figures above were counted on 21 August 2026. Modrinth is the only platform with an open counter for Soft Voxels Lite, so anyone downloading it elsewhere is not in this number.
Where Soft Voxels Lite sits in our shortlists
The one mid-range pack doing voxel lighting, which is why it is on that shortlist and not on the light one:
Why Soft Voxels Lite is not on the 1.21 shortlist
The last build is for 1.20.1, so the voxel lighting this pack is known for is not available on a 1.21 client at this hardware level. Rethinking Voxels does the same job on current versions, at a considerably higher price in video memory.
Best shaders for Minecraft 1.21Ready to install Soft Voxels Lite?
Another Iris-only pack. Our walkthrough gets Fabric and the mod sorted before you go anywhere near the shaderpacks folder.
Installation GuideSomewhere to run Soft Voxels Lite
Soft Voxels Lite gives you correct coloured light at medium cost, and the effect reads clearest in a base with lamps, glass and stained blocks. That is a build you finish over weeks on a world that stays up.
Soft Voxels Lite is a client side pack running under Iris, so the coloured light is calculated on your card. The lamps and stained glass that produce it sit in the world, where everyone can add more.
Set up a world for Soft Voxels LiteCode GUIDE5 is ours, and it applies to a Soft Voxels Lite world from the link above.Last updated . This page is rebuilt when its own figures change, not on every deploy.