Modrinth is an open-source platform for Minecraft modding. It hosts and shares mods, plugins, resource packs, shaders, datapacks, and modpacks. Players and creators can browse, download, and upload content easily. It also offers a launcher/app to help manage and install mods. We highly recommend using this launcher with Iris and sodium!

Photon Shaders is a clean, performance-friendly Minecraft shader with a natural look: dynamic sky and weather, soft variable-penumbra shadows, volumetric lighting/fog, and slick screen-space reflections for wet blocks and water. On Iris + Sodium you also get voxel-based colored lighting (higher presets), TAA with CAS sharpening, solid labPBR texture support, and good compatibility with Distant Horizons—making it a great “everyday” shader that looks polished without nuking FPS. 

Fresh Animations is a vanilla-faithful resource pack that overhauls mob models and adds expressive, smoother animations (breathing, blinking, limb sway) to make creatures feel alive; it relies on OptiFine’s Custom Entity Models or, on Fabric/Forge, the EMF+ETF mods (so it works fine with Sodium and most modpacks), and optional “Extensions” packs add extra model details and texture variants like floppy-eared pigs, calf/rooster variants, and more.

Motschen’s Better Leaves is a lightweight resource pack that makes leaf blocks look bushier and more natural by adding extra 3D layers—designed for high performance and broad compatibility with other packs; there’s also an optional add-on that extends support to many modded tree leaves, and if you enable OptiFine’s Smart Leaves or use the Fabric CullLeaves mod you can claw back even more FPS.