Realistic Fluids - GPU Water & Lava

Realistic Fluids

Water and lava that behave like real fluids. Every bucket you pour becomes thousands of particles simulated on your GPU: they splash, spread, run down slopes, fill holes and caves, and settle into calm pools with a smooth, continuous surface.

Beta. This version is functional and tested, but it is still an early release. Feedback and bug reports are very welcome!

Video

Recorded with an earlier development build. The current version has been improved since then.

Features

Realistic water

• GPU particle simulation (Position Based Fluids) with a smooth mesh surface.
• Pours, splashes, waves and waterfalls that follow the terrain.
• Water poured from cliffs or mountains keeps falling until it lands, even beyond the simulated area.
• Fill an empty bucket from realistic water to pick it back up.

Realistic lava

• Thick, slow, glowing lava simulated with its own viscosity.
• Lights up the blocks around it, like vanilla lava.
• Sets flammable blocks on fire (respects the doFireTick game rule).
• Steam and sizzling when realistic water boils away on lava.

Realistic slime and honey blocks

• Jelly-like blocks that wobble and deform when you walk, jump and land on them.

Blocks and items (Creative inventory)

• Realistic Water Bucket / Realistic Lava Bucket (next to the vanilla buckets).
• Realistic Water Source / Realistic Lava Source: outlets you can switch on and off.
• Realistic Drain: removes realistic fluid; open or close it.
• Realistic Slime Block / Realistic Honey Block.

Persistence

• Fluid that leaves the area around you is stored in the world save and keeps flowing block by block (falling and spreading) on the server.
• When you come back, it wakes up again as particles exactly where it was.
• Fluid far away from you is parked to save performance.

Controls and settings

• M: open the MineMod settings (also available through the MineMod... button in the Options screen).
• N: toggle the water view (mesh / particles).
• Settings include the water and lava distance (up to your render distance), water view, lava light, steam effects, a performance overlay and a button to remove all realistic fluid.
• Client commands: /fluid clear, /fluid stats, /fluid view mesh|fluid.

Requirements

• Minecraft 26.3
• Fabric Loader 0.19.5 or newer
• Fabric API (required)
• Java 25
• A GPU with OpenGL 4.6 support (compute shaders). A dedicated GPU is recommended.

Client and server

• Client: required. The simulation and rendering run on your GPU.
• Server: optional. Installing it on the server (or playing single player) enables the world-save persistence, block-by-block flow and lava fire. Without it, the fluid only lives in the area simulated around you.

Compatibility

Tested with Sodium, Iris (BSL shaders) and Continuity.

Known limitations

• Stored fluid far from you is drawn as simple blocks until you get close.
• Fluid only flows in loaded chunks.
• Multiplayer with many players pouring fluid in different places is not fully supported yet.
• Very large amounts of fluid can be heavy on weaker GPUs: use the distance settings to tune performance.

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More screenshots and videos coming soon.