Ask Final Fantasy 14 enthusiasts what mods they use, and many of them will say GShade, a fork of Reshade that lets you customize the game's visuals GShade has long been an MMO (and some other games) screen tool for making shots look pretty (open in a new tab), and by adding shaders you can get a more vibrant, avant-garde aesthetic.

GShade is no more, at least for now. Its creator, Marot Satil, announced on the GPOSERS Discord that there will be "no updates for the time being." However, as of this writing, GShade's GitHub (opens in new tab) page has been removed (opens in new tab), as has Satil's account.

In recent days, Satil has been fighting NotNite, another modder who has created an alternative version of the software called GeezShade. GeezShade is essentially a fork of ReShade, downloading most of the custom shaders from GShade and GeezShade is basically a fork of ReShade and uses a workaround to download and install most of the custom shaders from GShade.

"[GShade's] installer is a complete mess that is not even open source," NotNite writes on their blog (opens in new tab)." Of course, monkey see monkey get monkey idea - install ReShade with GShade shaders!"

NotNite writes on their blog (opens in tab).

NotNite also created an online tool to patch GShade and fix how it works when there are new updates. Normally, GShade disables itself when a new version comes out; NotNite's patch simply unchecks this.

Because of these things, Satil released a new version of GShade that breaks GeezShade and password-protects all files so that third-party apps cannot access them. In response, NotNite updated GeezShade (under the name DeezShade) to bypass the password requirement by using GShade's installer.

On Monday, GShade users who tried to use NotNite's new installer began rebooting their PCs (open in a new tab). Naturally, this was quickly communicated through the GShade community, as people were concerned about whether this could cause any real harm to their PCs.

NotNite confronted Satil about the forced reboot on the r/FFXIV Discord; Satil admitted that the reboot was part of a third-party software tamper-proof code using the GShade installer." This was intended to be a lesson to you specifically about taking this approach to problems." Satil wrote (open in new tab) "Anything could have been in the payload and you would have been responsible for distributing it to people and triggering it.

"I specifically chose to reboot because I wanted something that was still completely harmless but slightly more noticeable than a quick process kill. I consider it similar to what anti-heat software does when it finds something particularly bad."

Satil was subsequently banned from the r/FFXIV Discord and announced that the mod would no longer support GShade.

Without one of the most popular mods in FF14, players can migrate their custom settings to ReShade (open in a new tab) and return to taking Catgirl pictures.