Frequently Asked Questions

For our latest, Focal Engine enabled shaders, please follow these tutorials to learn how to install, and use our Focal Engine mod to download our latest shaders, as well as Stratum and it’s addons, from within the game itself!

Please refer to this tutorial for our older, Optifine only shaders.

Please contact our email support via our contact form here or our Discord support server here. Please have your order number ready if possible. 

Your subscription will continue until its full 30 day period is up, and you will get access to every build of RT released during that time. Your payment method will not be charged when your subscription ends and you will keep access to all builds released prior to your subscription ending in your account page as well.

You will not lose access to any builds of Continuum RT you paid for access too, even after ending your subscription. They stay available to redownload for as long as you have an active Continuum Graphics account!

To gain access to builds released after your subscription has ended, simply resubscribe.

Please refer to our Continuum System requirements page, here, or our Stratum System Requirements page, here.

We currently only officially support Optifine, our own Focal Engine, and the supporting mods that we officially call out as supported in the Focal Engine installation tutorial. Any other mods you use, you use at your own risk, and we provide no guarantee of function. Many may work, but we cannot possibly provide such a guarantee with the amount of mods out there, their updates, and their interactions with other mods and out products.

In very simple terms, it is a new shader mod, created by shader developers (us) for shader developers, with the intent to remove as many limitations on shader developers as possible. For a much more in depth look, please check out the Focal Engine Project page.

Please reference these installation instructions for installing Focal Engine

As of the latest version of Focal Engine, v1.0.9, it is compatible with Minecraft 1.14.4, 1.16.5, 1.17.1,1.19.2, 1.20.1. and 1.20.4. More versions are planned for future releases.

A 401 error usually means you have input the incorrect password, username, or email address.

There is one exception to this however: the Minecraft text box we use for the password field has a 32 character limit. This means that passwords longer than 32 characters will not fit in the box, and attempting to login with them will give you a 401 error. Until we resolve this issue, those of you with passwords in excess of 32 characters in length should change your passwords on the site to something equal to or less than 32 characters to ensure you can login to Focal Engine properly.

Most of our shaders are compatible with most versions of Minecraft, but that compatibility mostly relies on Optifine itself, especially with how far back they can go in Minecraft versions. To ensure maximum compatibility, make sure you have the latest version of Optifine available for your Minecraft version.

In the case of Continuum RT, as of Build 13 and later, it is only compatible with the MC versions that Focal Engine is compatible with. That means 1.14.4, 1.16.5, 1.17.1, 1.19.2 1.20.1, and 1.20.4 are officially supported at this time. RT versions before Build 13 are compatible with MC 1.14.4 only, with Optifine F5 being our recommendation.

Continuum Legacy Alpha builds are compatible with MC 1.14.4, 1.16.5, 1.17.1, 1.19.2 1.20.1, and 1.20.4, with Focal Engine v1.0.9 and later.

Continuum 2.1 Beta, RC and full releases are compatible with MC 1.14.4, 1.16.5, 1.17.1, 1.19.2 1.20.1, and 1.20.4, with Focal Engine v1.0.5 and up. More versions coming soon. See the ‘How do I install Focal Engine’ question for a link to the instructions, including required mod versions.

Continuum 2.1 Alpha, as we also state in the readme, has some requirements as well. You’ll need Optifine F2 Pre 3 or later at minimum to get it working on an older version of MC, so that limits how low you can go with it a bit. As of right now we officially support its use up to 1.16.5. Versions as low as MC 1.12.2 are also supported with Build 1 through 12. Later versions may also work, despite not being officially supported at this time.

As for Continuum 2.0.5, it is currently supported officially on up to MC version 1.19.0. Versions past that may work, but they may exhibit unintended visual anomalies.

Officially sanctioned Edits, like Continuum 2.0 Redux (the only sanctioned edit at this time), are currently officially supported on both MC 1.21.10 and 1.21.11, using Iris 1.9.6 or newer. Some older versions may work, but are not currently tested/endorsed. Continuum 2.0 Redux also requires Sodium 0.7.2 or newer, and (optionally) Voxy 0.2.6 or newer.

Continuum Shaders currently do not support Intel HD Graphics, this is usually the most common cause of this issue. If your machine only has Intel HD Graphics, there isn’t much you can do to solve this.

In certain cases though, usually on laptops with Intel CPU’s and Nvidia GPU’s, Minecraft will be run on the CPU’s integrated Intel HD Graphics instead of the Nvidia GPU, and that will also trigger this issue. To fix it, follow this tutorial.

We do not officially ‘support’ Iris, and have no plans to start, since all of our active shader projects use our own Focal Engine shader mod. Shaders built for Focal Engine are not inherently compatible with any other shader mod, and adapting them to be compatible would be extremely time consuming and usually result in a loss in functionality, performance, or both.

That being said, Iris’s goal is to mimic the Optifine Shader Pipeline, so that any Optifine shader, like some of ours older projects, just works. They have not fully done so as of the time of writing this however, which is why some of our older shaders still do not function on Iris. It is not our job to fix this, and we do not currently have plans to do so.

We would like to eventually support having Iris loaded alongside Focal Engine, like Optifine is now, so users can run both, and switch from a Focal Engine shader and an Iris shader whenever they like, without restarting the game. This may end up not being feasible however, but it is something that we will likely at least attempt.

In the meantime, Continuum 2.0 Redux, the officially sanctioned edit of Continuum 2.0.5 from Uvraj that we host on our site, is the only Continuum shader officially supported on Iris (with Iris 1.9.6 or newer). Users that cannot go without Iris should give this shader a try. It is available via our free downloads page.

The answer is…it depends. In most cases, shaders entirely dependent on the shadermod for game support. So if Focal Engine, Optifine, etc. are updated for the game version in question, the shader will probably work.

In some rarer cases though, the game will have such major changes that shaders will break, even when the shadermod is updated and stable for that game version. Even in such cases though, the shader may not be completely unusable, and you may not even notice the issues for a while. This is why we have ‘official’ supported versions listed, even when you may be able to load a given shader on a newer version of the game.

In regards to a subscription shader, like Continuum RT, we do our best to ensure that older builds will work on as many new versions of the game (and our Focal Engine) as possible, game updates and necessary Focal upgrades permitting. Sometimes updates to either will simply be too big to continue that forward compatibility though. A partial example of this is with one of Minecrafts recent, fairly major changes: doubling the world height. This broke RT’s underground quite severely, and necessitated an update to the shader to get things working properly underground on those new versions. We say ‘partial example’ here though, because those older builds still do mostly function on the latest versions of the game, with the exception of underground past a certain Y value.

Quite a few, but due to Minecraft’s pack version system it isn’t quite a one download fits all kind of thing, though it is getting a bit better in newer game versions.

You must download the appropriate version for your game version. The default download is for Minecraft 1.13 and up. The 1.12.2 version is for 1.12.2 (we have not tested it on older game versions than this, it may work on some, but we provide no guarantees for support for versions older than 1.12.2).

To be even more specific, the latest 1.13+ version is currently configured with a dynamic pack version of 15 to 75. This means that users using it on Minecraft 1.13 though 1.19.2 will have a warning stating that the pack was made for a newer version of the game, however, if you load it anyway, it will function fine. This is just an unfortunate side effect of Mojang’s pack version system. Users on Minecraft 1.20.1 through 1.21.11 should see no warning. If you wish to play on MC 1.12.2 or lower (1.12.2 is the lowest officially supported, but some older versions may work), select the 1.12.2 version of Stratum in the version dropdown at the time of download.

TL;DR: Stratum currently officially supports Minecraft 1.12.2 through 1.21.11, older and potential newer versions may work however.

As stated on the homepage, Store page and Stratum Project page, Stratum is an Early Access resourcepack, and as such is still in development.

This means it is normal for some textures to be missing. However, you might have more textures missing than is normal if you do not have the correct version of Stratum for your current game version, or you are using an outdated build of Stratum.

To start, Stratum 2K / 2048x requires Optifine to function at all (1K / 1024x may also require Optifine on modern versions of Minecraft). Make sure that is installed before trying to load it.

Also, ensure you meet the system requirements for whatever resolution of Stratum you’ve chosen before attempting to load it. You can find those here.

Finally, if you are using Minecraft 1.12.2 or older, ensure you have enough RAM allocated to Minecraft. If you do not know how to allocate more RAM to Minecraft, refer to this tutorial. Modern versions of Minecraft (1.13 and newer), do not require RAM allocation, and allocating too much RAM to them may hurt performance.

This is caused by using the ‘Fast’ graphics preset in video options, or by having leaves specifically set to Fast. Either set the games global quality setting to Fancy, or set Leaves specifically to Fancy to fix this issue.

As we mention on the home page and the Stratum project page, Stratums POM (the 3D effect) and PBR features require a compatible shader to work. We offer a selection of shaders, including a few free options that are built to enable these effects with Stratum right out of the box. For Optifine users specifically, the ‘Normal Maps’ and ‘Specular Maps’ settings must also be enabled in the shader selection menu for POM and PBR to function with Stratum (respectively).

Many third party shaders should work as well, so long as they support the LabPBR 1.3 specular format that Stratum uses to encode it’s POM and PBR data (click here for a list of LabPBR compatible shaders). That said, since there is no real standardization for POM depth (how deep the 3D effect appears), and thus every shaders default POM depth is a little different, we cannot control how Stratum will look in regards to POM with other shaders like we can with our own. This means users will often have to tune the POM depth (often called Parallax depth as well) in third party shaders to get the intended look. You may even have to enable POM / Parallax support with some third party shaders to get things working at all, as not all shaders have it enabled by default.

Continuum 2.0, Continuum 2.1 and Continuum Legacy are all tuned to have the intended POM depth out of the box though, and POM / Parallax is enabled by default in all of them.