Nova Reimagined Snow

A companion mod for Nova Reimagined that provides accurate snow-biome detection, snow texture variants, and shader-published DH material textures for texture-led distant terrain.

What it does

Nova Reimagined includes a shader-driven snow system that applies a snow appearance to surfaces in snowy biomes. Without this mod, the shader uses inSnowy - a player-position-based smoothed value - which causes snow tinting to visibly bleed across biome borders into adjacent warm biomes.

Nova Reimagined Snow solves that by building a biome snow eligibility texture that the shader samples in exact world space. It also resolves resource-pack textures and publishes them under stable IDs for the shader to use.

When used alongside Distant Horizons, the mod can also publish resource-pack textures for supported DH terrain materials so the shader can drive texture-led distant terrain.

Features

Per-block-column biome snow eligibility - exact biome boundaries, no bleed
Automatically sizes the eligibility texture to match your render distance
Handles render distance changes mid-session with automatic reallocation
Correctly suppresses snow tinting in the Nether and End
Resolves snow surface textures from active resource packs
Resolves DH LOD material textures from active resource packs
Stable shader-facing texture IDs for snow and DH LOD materials
Graceful fallback - shader still works without the mod using inSnowy
Client-side only - works on multiplayer servers with no server-side mod required

Requirements

Minecraft 1.21.x (Java Edition)
Fabric Loader 0.16.5+
Fabric API
Iris Shaders 1.6+
The companion Nova Reimagined shader pack

Optional integrations

Distant Horizons - enables DH LOD material texturing
Season Cache - when present, its server-authoritative per-chunk snow coverage drives the eligibility texture instead of the client-side biome sampler
Serene Seasons X Distant Horizons - optional for per-season grass tinting when your shader setup uses SSDH season metadata

Installation

Install Fabric Loader and Fabric API
Install Iris Shaders
Place compsnow-<version>.jar in your mods/ folder
Install the companion Nova Reimagined shader pack
Enable the shader pack in Iris settings
Enable the relevant snow / DH material features in shader settings

Snow Biome Map

The mod publishes two textures for exact snow-biome eligibility:

compsnow:snow_biome_map
compsnow:snow_biome_meta

The shader samples these in world space to determine whether a surface should receive snow treatment.

Configuring Texture Paths

The config file is created automatically at config/compsnow_snow_variants.json on first launch. Changes take effect after reloading resource packs (F3+T) - a full restart is not required.

Paths follow the standard Minecraft resource identifier format:

namespace:textures/path/to/texture.png

The namespace is usually minecraft for vanilla-replacing resource packs, or a pack-specific namespace. The path is relative to the assets/ root of the pack.

Snow Variant Textures

The mod resolves up to four snow surface textures and publishes them to the shader as:

compsnow:snow_variant_0
compsnow:snow_variant_1
compsnow:snow_variant_2
compsnow:snow_variant_3

The shader hashes world position to assign one of the four variants across terrain.

Modes

Auto (default)
Scans your active resource pack stack for snow textures and fills the four slots automatically. Any unfilled slots fall back to vanilla minecraft:textures/block/snow.png.

Manual_Override
You specify exactly which texture fills each of the four slots. Any slot left as "" falls back to vanilla snow.

What to put in the config

Set "mode": "Manual_Override" and fill "manualVariants" with four paths â€” one per slot. The shader uses whichever texture is in each slot for that position's hash bucket, so slot order matters.

If your resource pack has fewer than four snow textures, repeat the textures you do have to fill all four slots. The mod does not auto-propagate snow variants â€” any slot with an empty string or a path that fails to resolve falls back to vanilla snow instead.

Textures you have	How to fill the four slots
1	Repeat it in all four slots
2	Alternate: `[A, B, A, B]`
3	Repeat one: `[A, B, C, A]`
4	Fill normally: `[A, B, C, D]`

Example with two snow textures:

{
  "mode": "Manual_Override",
  "manualVariants": [
    "minecraft:textures/block/nature/snow/snow_1.png",
    "minecraft:textures/block/nature/snow/snow_2.png",
    "minecraft:textures/block/nature/snow/snow_2.png",
    "minecraft:textures/block/nature/snow/snow_1.png"
  ]
}

Distant Horizons LOD Material Textures

When used with Distant Horizons, the mod publishes resource-pack textures for supported DH terrain materials.

Published DH LOD texture IDs

Grass variants (8 slots):

compsnow:dh_lod_grass_0 through compsnow:dh_lod_grass_7

Single material textures:

compsnow:dh_lod_snow
compsnow:dh_lod_dirt
compsnow:dh_lod_stone
compsnow:dh_lod_deepslate
compsnow:dh_lod_sand

What the shader does with them

The shader uses these textures on the DH terrain path only. Because DH LOD terrain does not provide normal block-face UVs, the shader uses projected / world-space sampling rather than exact vanilla block mapping.

Grass uses projected texturing with up to 8 variants; selection is driven by a stable world-space noise field. Snow, dirt, stone, deepslate, and sand use their corresponding resolved textures. The shader remains texture-led but still supports optional seasonal grass tinting if paired with SSDH season metadata.

Configuring DH LOD textures

The dhLodTextures section of config/compsnow_snow_variants.json controls these slots.

Single-slot materials (snow, dirt, stone, deepslate, sand) each take one path. If a path is empty or fails to resolve, a neutral white 1Ã—1 pixel is used instead (the shader effectively ignores the slot).

Grass variants take up to eight paths. Unlike snow variants, the mod automatically propagates whichever grass paths successfully resolve across all eight shader slots. You only need to list the textures you actually have â€” the mod wraps them via modulo to fill the remaining slots.

Textures you have	What to put in `grassVariants`	Result
1	`["path_to_A.png"]`	A fills all 8 slots
2	`["path_to_A.png", "path_to_B.png"]`	A, B, A, B, A, B, A, B
4	Four paths	Each repeated twice
8	Eight paths	Used as configured

If none of the configured grass paths resolve successfully, all eight slots fall back to a neutral 1Ã—1 white texture.

Example with four grass textures:

{
  "dhLodTextures": {
    "enabled": true,
    "grassVariants": [
      "minecraft:textures/block/nature/grass/gt_1.png",
      "minecraft:textures/block/nature/grass/gt_2.png",
      "minecraft:textures/block/nature/grass/gt_3.png",
      "minecraft:textures/block/nature/grass/gt_4.png"
    ],
    "snow":      "minecraft:textures/block/nature/snow/snow_1.png",
    "dirt":      "minecraft:textures/block/soils/dirt/dirt.png",
    "stone":     "minecraft:textures/block/stone/stone_top_1.png",
    "deepslate": "minecraft:textures/block/stone/deepslate/top.png",
    "sand":      "minecraft:textures/block/soils/sand/sand.png"
  }
}

Compatibility

Environment	Status
Singleplayer	Yes
Multiplayer (no server mod)	Yes - client-side only
Distant Horizons	Yes - DH terrain texturing supported
Season Cache	Yes - server-authoritative snow coverage when present
Serene Seasons + SSDH	Yes - optional seasonal grass tinting
Shader pack without mod	Yes - falls back to `inSnowy` for snow logic
Forge / NeoForge	No - Fabric only
OptiFine	No - Iris only

Notes

DH material texturing improves visual parity, not exact vanilla block UV mapping on LOD terrain.
Seasonal grass tinting is handled by the shader when paired with SSDH's optional ssdh:season_meta texture.
This mod is entirely client-side.

License

MIT - see LICENSE

Credits

ItsThatNova - mod author and shader modifications
GitHub: https://github.com/ItsThatNova
EminGT - Complementary Reimagined shader pack, the base on which Nova Reimagined is built

Nova Reimagined Snow