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The Textures and Details page

By Ryleigh Newman · Published

The Textures & Details page in Rockstar Shaders has four toggles: Connected glass, Connected sandstone, Better grass and Natural textures. The first three are on by default and the fourth is off. All four are built into the pack and need no OptiFine, Continuity or any other mod beyond Fabric Loader and Fabric API; they are driven by a volume of block classes around the camera, 64 cells on a side, that the pack keeps up to date as you move.

I made Rockstar Shaders, a shader mod for Minecraft Java 26.3 on Apple Silicon Macs, and these help pages exist so every setting has a plain explanation beside it, written from the code as it stands in 1.0.

Emissive textures and parallax mapping are not on this page; the sections below say where they are. Resource packs in the OptiFine format have their own page: Resource packs.

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

What the four toggles have in common

Each of these effects changes how a block's face is drawn according to what its neighbors are. To do that the pack keeps a volume of block classes around the camera, 64 by 64 by 64 cells, and the shaders read it while drawing terrain to decide how a face joins the faces next to it. The volume moves with you.

All four are tune settings. A change applies when the page closes with Done, which rebuilds the shader pipelines in about a second. There is no resource pack to add and no second mod to install; Fabric Loader and Fabric API are the pack's only requirements. If a resource pack of your own carries a connected-texture rule for a block, that rule wins for that block: the pack removes the block from its built-in class volume so the two do not both cut into it.

Connected glass

Connected glass makes glass, tinted glass and stained glass lose the frame between neighboring blocks. A window built from a grid of glass blocks becomes one pane with a frame around the outside only, and a wall of stained glass keeps its color and drops the internal lines. It is on by default.

Glass has more going on than its frame. Windows and panes reflect the sky and the scene, and mirror what is in front of them, under Glass reflections and Glass screen trace on the Reflections and Materials page. Stained glass also tints the sunlight that passes through it, because the shadow maps carry colored translucent casters; that lives on Lighting and Shadows.

Connected sandstone

Connected sandstone is for stacked sandstone. A wall of it built course on course shows the block's cap band as a stripe on every block; with this toggle on, the wall keeps one cap band and the courses between run smooth. It is on by default.

Glass and sandstone are the two connected-texture rules built into the pack. Any other block that needs one gets it from a resource pack in the OptiFine format, which the pack reads without OptiFine; the Resource packs page lists the methods it accepts.

Better grass

Better grass shows grass on the sides of grass blocks on a grassy slope, instead of dirt. Without it, every step of a hill shows a brown band under a green top, the way the original game draws it; with it, a hillside reads as grass down the slope. It is on by default.

It changes which texture the side face is drawn with, decided from the class volume; the block itself and its lighting are unchanged. Flat ground looks the same with it on or off.

Natural textures

Natural textures turns sand, dirt, gravel, stone and grass tops per block, so a field of one block type stops showing the same tile in the same orientation over and over. It is off by default, the only toggle on this page that is. Turn it on if a beach or a stone floor reads as a repeated pattern; the original game's regular tiling is what you get with it off.

Only those five block types are turned. Everything else keeps the orientation its texture was drawn in.

Emissive textures and parallax: where they live

Emissive textures are not a toggle here because they come from resource packs. A pack in the OptiFine format that carries an emissive.properties file and textures with the _e suffix gets them drawn as emissive by Rockstar Shaders, without the z-fighting other loaders show. Emissive blocks and entities then bloom through the same emission channel as the pack's own light. That format is documented in OptiFine's own repository, read on 2026-09-19; the pack reads it with no OptiFine installed.

Parallax mapping, relief on blocks from their own texture, is on the Lighting and Shadows page as Parallax mapping, off by default. Two more texture questions live elsewhere: how far a block's texture may darken a metal's mirror is Metal texture shade on Reflections and Materials, and Smart leaf culling on Performance and Overlays skips leaf faces buried three leaves deep inside a canopy.

Resource packs in the OptiFine format

The pack reads OptiFine's resource-pack formats natively, written from the published formats with no dependency on Continuity, EMF or ETF. That covers connected textures from optifine/ctm properties files with the ctm, horizontal, vertical, h+v, v+h, top, random, repeat and fixed methods; emissive block textures; custom entity models with the full animation expression language, with Fresh Animations v1.10.5 verified in game; random entity textures with biome, height, name, health, moon phase, time, weather and profession rules; emissive entity textures; and custom skies with up to eight layers. OptiFine's own documentation, read on 2026-09-19, also defines ctm_compact and the overlay methods; the pack recognizes those and skips them with a log line.

A block covered by a pack's CTM rule is removed from the built-in class volume, so the toggles on this page and a pack's rules never both cut into the same block. The Resource packs page has the folder names, the rules and the limits, including that custom skies are drawn behind the blocky cloud deck and are not yet reflected in water.

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.

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Questions

Do I need OptiFine or Continuity for connected glass in Rockstar Shaders?

No. Connected glass, connected sandstone, Better Grass and natural textures are built into the pack and need no other mod. Fabric Loader and Fabric API are the only requirements.

Why does my glass still show frames between blocks?

Check that Connected glass is on and that the change was applied: a tune setting takes effect when the page closes with Done. If the whole world looks like vanilla, the pack is not rendering at all; the settings header says so, and the Troubleshooting page starts from there.

Do a resource pack's connected textures work alongside the built-in ones?

Yes. A block covered by the pack's CTM rule is removed from the built-in class volume, so the pack's rule draws it and the built-in one leaves it alone. The ctm_compact and overlay methods are skipped, with a line in the log.

Where is parallax mapping?

On the Lighting and Shadows page, as Parallax mapping, off by default. It draws relief on blocks from their own texture.

Do emissive textures work?

Yes, from a resource pack in the OptiFine format: an emissive.properties file and textures with the _e suffix. They are drawn without the z-fighting other loaders show, and they bloom. There is no toggle for them on this page.

What does Natural textures change?

Sand, dirt, gravel, stone and grass tops are turned per block to break the tiling. It is off by default; the other three toggles on the page are on.