Frequently Asked Questions

Please refer to this tutorial for our Optifine only shaders, see the ‘How do I install Focal Engine’ question for our Focal Engine enabled shaders.

Please contact our email support via our contact form here or our Discord support via the invite link along the top of the site. 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. 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

The latest version of Focal Engine, v1.0.6, is compatible with Minecraft 1.14.4, 1.16.5, 1.17.1, and 1.19.2. 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 and 1.19.2 are officially supported. Later versions may work but are a ‘use at your own risk’ thing. Versions before Build 13 are compatible with MC 1.14.4 only, with Optifine F5 being the recommendation.

Continuum 2.1 Beta is compatible with MC 1.14.4, 1.16.5, 1.17.1 and 1.19.2, with Focal Engine v1.0.5 and up. More versions coming soon (Minecraft 1.19.4 support is in production). 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.

Continuum Shaders currently do not support Intel HD Graphics, this is usually the most common cause of this issue. If you have Intel HD Graphics there isn’t much you can do to solve this. In certain cases though, on laptops with Intel CPU’s and Nvidia GPU’s, Minecraft will be run on Intel HD Graphics instead of the Nvidia GPU by default, and you will get this issue, to fix it, follow this tutorial.

We do not officially ‘support’ Iris, and have no plans to; that being said, Iris’s goal is to mimic the Optifine Shader Pipeline, so that any Optifine shader, like some of ours, just works. They have not fully done so as of the time of writing this, which is why some of our shaders still do not function on Iris. It is not our job to fix this, and we will not be taking it upon ourselves to attempt to do so.

Something else to keep in mind; all of our current and future Focal shaders will not support Iris at all, in any capacity, for what we hope are obvious reasons.

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 a one download fits all kind of thing,. You must download the appropriate version for your game version. The default download is for MC 1.13 and up. The 1.12.2 version is for 1.12.2 (we have not tested it lower than this, use at your own risk).

To be more specific, the latest 1.13+ version is currently configured with a pack version of 13. This means that users using it on Minecraft 1.13 though 1.19.4 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 should see no warning however. 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 it in the version dropdown at the time of download.

TL;DR: Stratum currently officially supports Minecraft 1.12.2 through 1.20.1, older and potential newer versions may work however.

As stated on the homepage, store page and Stratum Info pages, Stratum is an Early Access resourcepack, and as such is still in development. So 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 MC version.

To start, Stratum 2K / 2048x requires Optifine to function at all. Make sure that is installed before trying to load it. Also, ensure you meet the system requirements for Stratum 2K before attempting to load it. You can find those here. Finally, if you are using MC 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 MC (1.13 and newer), do not require RAM allocation.

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.