[!WARNING] Beta. Features are still being developed and tested.

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Requirements

Game	Fallout 4 runtime 1.11.240. OG and NG code paths exist but are untested.
Fallout 4 Script Extender (F4SE)	Required.
Address Library for F4SE	Required.
Addictol	Recommended. All-in-one engine patch (stability, performance, bug fixes) by Dear-Modding-FO4 (includes me), the maintainers of the CommonLibF4 fork this plugin builds on.
DearModdingUI	Recommended. Provides the in-game menu, performance overlay, and shader compilation window. Use DearModdingUI 2.2 or a later 2.x release; older 2.x releases lack the shader compilation window, and other versions are logged and ignored, leaving Community Shaders headless.

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Installation

Download a package from Releases and install it with your mod manager. The Latest release is stable; the prerelease is the newest development build. Uninstall by removing the mod.

See the changelog for release history, also available in-game under General > Changelog.

Report problems through Issues with Documents\My Games\Fallout4\F4SE\FO4CommunityShaders.log attached. For questions, join the Community Shaders Discord and use its Fallout 4 channel.

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Features

Features ship inactive and are not all fully validated. See activation.

Feature	Purpose
Screen Space Shadows	Contact shadows and finer shadow detail.
Terrain Shadows	Long-range shadows from terrain.
Sky Sync	Sun, moon and godray lighting follow the bodies in the sky, with an optional alternate sun path.
Cloud Shadows	Shadows from clouds that move across the landscape and water.
Volumetric Shadows	Blurred sun shadow maps that soften the sun's soft, rim, and back lighting and shadow the sun on water and effects.
Terrain Variation	Stochastic terrain texture sampling to reduce tiling, including LOD terrain and landscape-textured meshes.
Terrain Blending	Terrain blends into objects that sink into it, removing the hard seam.
Extended Materials	Parallax on objects and terrain, with sun parallax shadows; object parallax needs a height map in the specular texture's alpha.
LOD Blending	LOD terrain and object brightness and gamma matching, optional terrain vertex-color removal.
Screen Space GI	Ambient occlusion and indirect lighting.
Subsurface Scattering	Separable or Burley scattering for skin, replacing the vanilla skin blur.
Skylighting	Scales ambient light and reflections by how much sky a surface can see.
Light Limit Fix	Smoke, fire, glow, rain and water receive every nearby light, with portal-strict lights bound to rooms and a clustered light count debug view; physically based inverse-square falloff for lights authored in light TOML files, with converting unauthored lights opt-in.
Dynamic Cubemaps	Reflections that respond to the surrounding scene.
Image Based Lighting	Ambient light and fog tint from environment and sky cubemaps; requires Dynamic Cubemaps.
Water Effects	Water parallax and sunlight caustics on submerged surfaces.
Unified Water	Distant water matches near water; placed water keeps vanilla distance rendering.
Motion Vector Fixes	Motion-data corrections for temporal rendering.
Upscaling	TAA, FSR 3/4, and DLSS.
Frame Generation	FSR 3/4, DLSS, and supported Multi Frame Generation modes.
Performance Overlay	FPS, frame-time, and latency graphs, plus per-feature GPU timings.
CS Editor	Weather picker, weather lock, time controls, and per-weather feature overrides.
RenderDoc	In-game frame capture for debugging.
Remote Control	Drives Community Shaders from AI assistants and scripts through the DevBench plugin.

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Feature activation

Every feature starts inactive and is opt-in. Settings live in Data\F4SE\Plugins\FO4CommunityShaders\FO4CommunityShaders.toml, created on first launch (in MO2, under Overwrite) and kept across updates. Uncomment a line to change it, or use the in-game menu:

[features.ScreenSpaceShadows]
load = true

Feature loading is evaluated at startup—restart the game after enabling or disabling features. Settings for already-loaded features can be adjusted live in-game.

The menu writes only changed values. Reset restores each setting's commented default.

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Shader compilation

Shaders compile at startup when they are not already cached, such as on first launch or after an update that changes them. When compilation takes over a second, Continue, Load, and New Game wait behind the main menu's loading spinner until it finishes, and DearModdingUI shows a progress window.

Set background_compilation = true under [shader_cache] to play while shaders compile instead. It applies at the next launch, and shaders not yet compiled render as stock. Loads that bypass the main menu, such as the console load command or autoload mods, are never held and render stock shaders until compilation finishes.

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In-game Menu

Settings, feature toggles, and the performance overlay use DearModdingUI. Without it, edit the TOML file instead.

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Building from source

See CONTRIBUTING.md for setup, building, testing, and deployment.

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Compatibility notes

• ENB is unsupported.
• The standalone Motion Vector Fixes (MotionVectorFixes.dll) and Dynamic Cubemaps F4 (DynamicCubemapF4.dll) plugins are incompatible; CS includes both, so remove them. While either is in Data\F4SE\Plugins, CS disables all hooks and features and shows a message at launch.
• Native HDR mods (RenoDX, Special K HDR) are unsupported with Upscaling or Frame Generation and untested otherwise.
• Linux/Proton needs a Windows 10 d3dcompiler_47.dll in the prefix's system32 or next to Fallout4.exe; Proton's built-in compiler cannot build the shaders.
• Upscaling requires a DX12-capable GPU. DLSS requires compatible NVIDIA RTX hardware.
• FSR 4 requires compatible AMD Radeon hardware.
• Upscaling (except TAA) and frame generation require borderless windowed mode.
• ReShade (standard dxgi.dll install) works with Upscaling and Frame Generation: effects apply before the UI, appear in generated frames, and get non-reversed depth (RESHADE_DEPTH_INPUT_IS_REVERSED=0).
• Supported upscaling and frame-generation methods can change while playing; switching may briefly pause rendering.
• Terrain Shadows ships heightmaps for the base-game and DLC worldspaces; other worldspaces need an xLODGen height map export.
• RenderDoc capture requires an installed RenderDoc, found automatically; dll_path overrides it.
• Remote Control registers its tools only when the DevBench plugin is installed; it runs no server of its own.

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License

Licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later with the project Modding and Linking Exceptions. See LICENSE for the full text.