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Keys and shortcuts

By Ryleigh Newman · Published 19 September 2026

Rockstar Shaders watches two keys of its own. K opens the settings screen in a world, and holding C zooms the view in four times, with the mouse wheel changing the magnification while the key is down. Both are ordinary Minecraft key bindings, listed under Miscellaneous in Controls, so you can move them. On any of the pack's settings pages, holding F1 hides the menu so the world shows, and vanilla's F3 hides the pack's overlays while it is up.

I made Rockstar Shaders, and I wanted as few keys as possible: one to reach every setting, one to look at something far away. This page lists each key, what it does by default, and where to change it.

Download free (1.0.0) Modrinth (pending)Minecraft 26.3, Fabric, macOS on Apple silicon. Install guide. Releases and bug reports on GitHub.

The defaults

• K: open the Rockstar Shaders settings. Fires only when no other screen is open.
• C, held: zoom in four times, eased in and out, with the mouse slowed to match.
• Mouse wheel while C is held: change the zoom instead of the hotbar slot.
• F1, held on any Rockstar Shaders settings page: hide the whole menu; release brings it back.
• F3: vanilla's debug screen. The pack's overlays hide while it is up.

K and C are the two the mod registers, as Rockstar Shaders settings and Zoom (hold) under Miscellaneous in Controls. There is no key that switches the pack on and off; that is the master switch, the first row of the settings screen.

K: the settings screen

K opens the front page of the settings when you are in a world with nothing else open. The same screen is on the title screen, behind a Rockstar Shaders button at the bottom left, and as the first row of Options > Video Settings, so it is reachable even if K has been rebound to something you have forgotten. Each category page is titled "Rockstar Shaders:" and the category's name, and Done at the bottom of any page applies the tune settings you changed, which rebuilds the shader pipelines in about a second. First launch walks through what the front page shows.

C: hold to zoom

While C is down the field of view narrows to a quarter, which is a 4x zoom, eased over about 120 ms on the way in and again on the way out, and the mouse sensitivity is scaled by the same factor so the crosshair does not race. Let go and the view eases back.

The mouse wheel changes the zoom while the key is held, instead of changing the hotbar slot. One notch in multiplies the zoom factor by 0.8, one notch out by 1.25, between 0.05, which is 20x, and 0.6. Releasing C forgets the adjustment, so the next zoom starts at 4x again. If you do not want the key at all, the Zoom key toggle on the Performance & Overlays page switches the zoom off; its tip reads "Hold C (rebindable) to zoom in four times, eased, with the mouse slowed to match."

Rebinding K and C

Both keys are registered as Fabric key mappings, so vanilla's Controls screen handles them like any other binding. They sit under Miscellaneous as Rockstar Shaders settings and Zoom (hold). Pick whatever key you like for either. K fires only when no other screen is open, so it does nothing while a chat box, a sign or another menu is up, whichever key it is on. The zoom stays a hold after rebinding. F1 on the settings pages and F3 are not bindings of the mod's own and are not rebound here: the pages watch F1 while they are open, and the overlays watch for vanilla's debug screen.

F1 and See-through: watching the world while you tune

Every Rockstar Shaders page, the front page, the category pages, Advanced and Pregenerate, hides itself while F1 is held, so you can change a setting and look at the water without closing and reopening the menu. The front page also has a See-through: ON/OFF button under View. With it on, the pages stop painting their backdrop and fade their widgets to the Menu opacity value, 0.6 by default and adjustable from 0.15 to 1.0 in steps of 0.05, so the world stays visible behind the labels. Lower shows more of the world and makes the labels harder to read.

F3 and the overlays

The pack has its own overlays, all on the Performance & Overlays page and off by default. Show FPS prints the frames per second and frame time as a mean over the last 120 frames, followed by "Rockstar Shaders", or "vanilla" in amber when the pack is not rendering, and adds the render scale when the world is drawn below the window's resolution. Extended FPS adds the last second's minimum and 1% low. Show coordinates adds position, facing, block, chunk and biome. Show pass timings lists every pack pass in GPU milliseconds, with a total row and any pass over 2 ms in amber. Overlay corner is top left or top right.

All of them hide under F3 and whenever the HUD is hidden, so a bug report screenshot with the F3 overlay shows vanilla's debug text and nothing of the pack's. Performance and overlays covers each line in detail.

Download free (1.0.0) Modrinth (pending)Minecraft 26.3, Fabric, macOS on Apple silicon. Install guide. Releases and bug reports on GitHub.

About the author. Ryleigh Newman wrote Rockstar Shaders and every page on this site. Facts about other packs and programs come from their own sites, with the date they were read. More about the project.

Related

• First launch: the Vulkan prompt and the master switch
• The Performance and Overlays page
• Quality settings: what ships, and what to lower first
• Troubleshooting: when the world looks like vanilla

Questions