Cinder (Particle Culling)

🔥 Cinder

A lightweight Fabric mod that makes particles way less laggy, without making them look worse.

Ever notice your FPS tank near a nether portal, a big campfire farm, or a fight full of potion clouds? That's particles. Minecraft is honestly not great at handling a lot of them at once, and the base game doesn't even try to skip particles you can't see. Cinder fixes that. 🎉

🚀 What does Cinder actually do?

Cinder stops particles from being created in the first place when you wouldn't have noticed them anyway:

• 📏 Distance limit: particles past a certain range just don't spawn.
• 👀 Only spawns what's in your view: if a particle would be behind you or way off to the side, why bother? Turns itself off automatically if you switch to third person, since that would break it.
• 🧱 Hidden behind walls? Skipped too, so particles on the other side of a wall or underground don't waste your FPS.
• 🌫️ Thins out distant particles: things far away get randomly reduced more, so it fades out naturally instead of just vanishing at a hard line.
• 🚦 A hard cap per tick: so a huge explosion or a mass of villagers doesn't spawn thousands of particles at once and choke your game.

🎛️ Control specific particle types

Some particles are way more expensive than others. Cinder lets you turn specific particle types down or off completely, without touching anything else. Want portals at 30% and critical hit particles gone entirely? Easy, just edit two lines in the config.

⚡ Physics and rendering tweaks

• Particles far away, or just floating in open air with nothing around them, skip collision checks they don't need.
• Particles fade out smoothly over their last few frames instead of just popping out of existence.
• Lighting on particles is calculated once per game tick instead of constantly recalculating the same thing over and over on every single frame. This one actually helps even when you're staring straight at a particle, not just when you turn away from it.

📐 Distance that scales with your settings

Instead of a fixed number, you can set Cinder's particle distance as a percentage of your render distance. Bump up your render distance later and particles automatically reach further too, no need to go tweak the config again.

🤝 Plays nice with Sodium and Lithium

Cinder doesn't touch anything Sodium or Lithium already handle, so you can run all three together with zero conflicts. Think of it like this:

• 🎨 Sodium makes things faster to draw.
• 🧠 Lithium makes general game logic faster.
• 🔥 Cinder decides which particles are even worth drawing or simulating in the first place.

Three different jobs, so they just stack instead of fighting each other.

⚙️ Configuration

Everything is in config/cinder.json, and it's created automatically the first time you launch. You don't need to touch it at all if you just want it to work out of the box!

A couple of these are worth explaining:

• particleTypeOverrides 🎯: this is where you list specific particle types you want to turn down or off. The number is a percentage from 0.0 (completely off) to 1.0 (normal, no change). So 0.3 means "only let 30% of these actually spawn."
• useRelativeDistance 📐: turn this on if you want particle distance to automatically follow your render distance setting instead of using a fixed number.

If you have Mod Menu and YACL installed, most of these (except the particle type list, since that one doesn't really fit a slider or toggle) show up in a nice in-game settings screen too. 🖱️

⚠️ Some notes

• If you use a freecam or a zoom mod, culling might act a little weird since it relies on knowing where your camera actually is.

❤️ Credits

The ideas behind particle culling and per-type controls aren't brand new, other great particle optimization mods (shoutout to Particle Core) paved the way here.

📄 License

MIT, do whatever you want with it.