Complementary Shaders Quality Presets Explained

Every Complementary Shaders settings conversation starts with the profiles: a ladder of quality presets that runs from Potato to Ultra. A preset is not a single switch, it is a coherent bundle of dozens of individual values, chosen by the developers to balance looks and cost at each level. This guide explains what the presets actually change, how to pick yours, and how to use a preset as a starting point rather than a final answer.

The ladder

The exact bundle at each level is the developers' tuning, refined across releases, treat the table as orientation, not a specification sheet. What matters practically is the spacing: each step changes several things at once, which is why jumping two steps feels dramatic.

What a preset actually changes

Moving up the ladder typically raises, together: shadow resolution and distance, reflection quality, cloud detail, atmospheric richness, and assorted per-effect quality toggles. Moving down reverses them in a considered order, the developers trim the most expensive, least visible items first. This is the preset's real value: it encodes knowledge about which effects cost what, so you do not have to discover the trade-offs one crash at a time.

Picking your preset

1. Start one step below your expectation for your hardware (Medium for a typical gaming PC, Low for anything older or integrated).
2. Load your busiest scene, your main base, a big view, a farm, not an empty field.
3. Play for a few minutes, including looking at water and a sunset if you can.
4. Smooth? Step up and repeat. Struggling? Step down, or fix the real culprit first, render distance (guide) often matters more than the profile.

For a fuller method, see the performance optimisation guide; for weak hardware specifically, Potato vs Low vs High compared shows what each end of the ladder looks like.

Using a preset as a starting point

The professional way to use presets: pick the highest preset that performs well, then adjust individual settings around your taste. Love the High profile but hate its fog? Keep High, change the fog. The preset got you a coherent baseline; your overrides make it yours. Two cautions:

• Changing the profile afterwards resets the bundle, your individual tweaks are replaced by the new preset's values. Decide the profile first, tweak second, and re-decide the profile only deliberately.
• Your tweaks are saved per style and per version filename, the mechanics are in keeping settings across updates.

What a preset does not change

Knowing a preset's boundaries prevents two common confusions. A profile governs the pack's internal effect quality, it does not touch:

• Your game's render distance. That is a Minecraft video setting, and it remains the heaviest dial in the whole setup. A player on Ultra with a modest render distance may have a smoother game than a player on Medium with distance pushed far.
• Your display resolution and the loader's own options. Resolution is set by the game and your monitor; loader-level items such as Iris's shadow distance cap live in the loader's screen, outside the pack's profiles entirely.
• Your choice of style. Unbound and Reimagined each keep their own profile selection and settings. Moving up the ladder in one style says nothing about the other.
• The look's fundamentals. A preset raises or lowers the fidelity of a style's vision; it does not turn Reimagined into Unbound. If the character of the light feels wrong at every profile, the style, not the ladder, is the decision to revisit (which style to choose).

The one-up, one-down method

Once a preset is chosen, most players' real configuration emerges from a simple balancing habit: for every individual setting you raise above the preset, look for one you can lower. The preset's bundle is roughly cost-balanced for its tier; overrides drift the total, and the habit keeps the drift honest.

In practice it looks like this. A player settles on Medium, then falls in love with what higher shadow resolution does to their base at golden hour, and raises it. The bill arrives. Rather than dropping the profile, which would reset everything, they look for a setting their play barely uses: perhaps cloud detail, because their base sits in a forest where the sky is mostly canopy, or reflection quality, because their world is landlocked. One down pays for one up, and the configuration stays inside the performance envelope the preset promised.

Two disciplines make the method work. First, change one thing at a time and revisit the same scene, or you will not know which override spent or saved what. Second, write the overrides down. They are few, most players end with two to four, but they live in a settings file tied to the pack's filename, and a note is what turns an update from a loss into a two-minute rebuild (see keeping settings across updates).

A related habit: treat deliberate profile changes as excursions, not drift. Stepping up a profile for a screenshot session or a first visit to a new build is legitimate, provided you step back afterwards, deliberately, before the heavier bundle becomes your unnoticed everyday cost. The players who struggle with presets are rarely those who chose the wrong one; they are those who changed it casually and forgot.

Frequently asked questions