5 best Minecraft 1.21 performance and optimization mods

Minecraft has come a long way since its early development, but depending on a player's hardware and the game's capabilities, performance issues can sometimes manifest. This can occur in the form of framerate drops, slow chunk loading, unusual graphical artifacts, and many more issues. Fortunately, there are plenty of mods that can vastly improve overall performance and stability.

From removing excess mob rendering and improving loading times to fundamentally fixing many of Minecraft's original engine problems, there is no shortage of mods to improve framerates, reduce graphical glitches, and boost optimization. Many of these mods can provide incredible improvements even if players aren't using top-of-the-line hardware.

Note: This list is subjective and solely reflects the opinions of the writer

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5 Minecraft performance and optimization mods for noticeable improvements

1) Sodium

Sodium offers unparalleled Minecraft performance boosts (Image via Jellysquid3/Modrinth)

When it comes to pure performance increases in Minecraft, it's hard to find a better mod than Sodium. Without getting into finer details of how it works, Sodium essentially replaces the game's rendering code to implement modern rendering techniques for visuals, lighting, CPU and GPU usage, and many more aspects of Mojang's sandbox title.

Thanks to its fully rewritten system, Sodium can provide framerate increases of almost double or triple what players were experiencing before installing it, making it an essential mod in the eyes of many fans in the community.

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2) Entity Culling

Entity Culling removes mobs and other entities that can bog down Minecraft's processing load (Image via Mojang)

Minecraft spawns plenty of entities during a player's adventures, from mobs to gravity-affected blocks. However, not all of these entities can be reached by the player at a given time. They don't do much otherwise but put more strain on a player's hardware to render them. Fortunately, Entity Culling helps amend this substantially by preventing some entities from rendering.

The mod utilizes path tracing from the viewpoint of the player and prevents entities from rendering that aren't within a player's field of vision. This should help reduce processing load on a player's hardware and therefore speed up rendering of other parts of the game world and improve framerates as well.

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3) FerriteCore

Ferritecore makes a collection of memory optimizations to improve framerates (Image via Malte0811/Modrinth)

Minecraft can use a surprising amount of virtual memory to render worlds and conduct various game-related tasks. However, given that much of Java Edition's old code is still unoptimized from its earliest development phases, this is somewhat understandable. Until Mojang implements an optimization update, mods like Ferritecore may be worth installing.

Though the specifics are very technical, the short story is that Ferritecore implements multiple tweaks and memory usage changes to save hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes of processing power to focus on other tasks.

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4) Concurrent Chunk Management Engine

The borders of a world chunk as shown in Java Edition (Image via Mojang)

Minecraft world generation is handled as a series of "chunks" that load in as players roam the game world, while others out of their reach are prevented from loading in until they're needed. However, chunk loading can still heavily bog down CPU performance, especially if players have their render and simulation distances at particularly high settings.

With the Concurrent Chunk Management Engine mod, chunk loading and input/output are handled with multiple CPU cores to improve chunk performance and prevent stutters and FPS slowdowns.

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5) Let Me Despawn

Let Me Despawn gets rid of problematic entities that refuse to be removed when they should be (Image via Frikinjay/Modrinth)

Minecraft typically spawns and despawns mobs as necessary, but occasionally, things don't go as planned. Entities can occasionally have their NBT data changed in a way that makes them permanent, such as when an undead mob picks up weapons/armor and equips them. This can lead to entity lag when too many mobs or other entities are made persistent and refuse to respawn.

This mod addresses this by tweaking the despawn rules so that entities that have been marked as persistent for certain reasons (like the aforementioned equipment pickups) can be despawned like other non-persistent entities. This is particularly useful on servers where entity clutter can cause immense connection and performance problems.