Shaders — Start Here

Shaders are the "juice" layer: hit-flashes, swaying crops, water, day/night tint. This shelf is ordered so you get a real effect on a real sprite within the first hour, then backfill the theory — the reverse of most shader courses, and the order that actually sticks.

The path#

1. Your first canvas_item shader — Godot-native, zero prerequisites. An effect on your own sprite today.
2. Thinking in fragments — The Book of Shaders track: the mental model that turns copy-paste into understanding.
3. Pixel-art game recipes — the payoff: outlines, flashes, wind, water, palette tricks for the farming game — plus the masters' shelf for when you're hungry for more.

One warning before you start#

Godot's shading language looks like GLSL but isn't — and most shader material online is GLSL (Shadertoy), HLSL (Unity), or written for Godot 3. The official GLSL → Godot conversion page is the bridge; keep it open whenever you port anything. Old Godot tutorials have their own drift (hint_color became source_color in 4.x) — treat any pre-2023 Godot shader code as a translation exercise, not a paste.

The rule of the shelf#

Every effect you learn ships into a project scene. A shader that only ran in a tutorial folder doesn't count.