I keep having issues with the blur coming in and out of water. And I have nothing installed that would be causing it. No optifine or dynamic light mod. Black boxes coming out. And this black icon going in and coming out sometimes.

@Aceplante2 If you are using Optifine you need to disable certain settings to make it work. You can check that by going to shaders. If you are using embeddium the same might happen. You can install Oculus to get around that I think.

I am not using optifine, but I am using embeddium. I am fairly certain I use oculus tho

Are shaders enabled if yes it should definitely work. If not you need to tweak the settings a bit.

its a shader? i may have disabled them

It is a shader, that's why it needs to be enabled.

it still happens and this is what I see when I toggle shaders:

when I get out of water, a large black box covers most of my screen

As I said shaders not be enabled. Maybe your graphic card does not support it? You can disable the effect in the config. Use the command /cmdclientconfig. The effect is called water splash.

I disabled that but a minor version happens when I get at low health too... it seems hard to avoid?

You can disable this effect as well handlers -> low health -> blur.

That is not a bug, but a feature called splash. You can configure it using the command /cmdclientconfig .

what about the black thing in the middle on the first screenshot?

I am also seeing a black box upon entering or exiting water, and when I'm at low health and have the "heartbeat" effect. For some reason though, I couldn't seem to get a screenshot