OptiFine could be pulling their socks in terms of keeping up with Minecraft updates

Mojang recently released The Garden Awakens Drop for Minecraft. After almost every official update by the company, the game's modding community becomes active and starts releasing official updated versions of their mods. These are third-party modifications that add new features to the game. Many are extremely quick and immediately release updates for new game versions, especially performance mods that players frequently use.

This was not the case for one of the most popular Minecraft performance mods, OptiFine. In recent times, they have been quite slow in keeping up with Minecraft updates. After The Garden Awakens Drop's release, however, it seems that they have picked up speed and are quickly catching up to newer versions of the game.

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How OptiFine picked up the pace to keep up with Minecraft updates after The Garden Awakens

OptiFine mod updates have been delayed

Over the years, OptiFine has slowed its update cycle. When the latest Minecraft 1.21 update was released in June, OptiFine developers were still working on a stable version of 1.20.6, which came out several months before 1.21.

In contrast, other performance mods like Sodium, Lithium, Rubidium and more were already compatible with the Minecraft 1.21 version and are readily available with better performance boosts than OptiFine.

This was one of the main reasons why OptiFine was losing users. Most players wanted to enjoy new features from updates with a smoother experience but were unable to since OptiFine was not ready for it.

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How OptiFine picked up the pace in updating their mod after The Garden Awakens Drop

OptiFine quickly released the official mod version for 1.21.3 and preview versions of 1.21.4 (Image via Mojang Studios)

The Garden Awakens drop was released on December 3, 2024. This update brought a new Creaking mob, the Pale Garden biome, a new wood set, and a new material called resin that can be formed into bricks and blocks.

As soon as the update dropped, most performance mods were also updated to the latest version to be compatible. Before the release, OptiFine was still stuck on a preview version of the 1.21.3 Bundles of Bravery update.

Now, however, they drastically picked up the pace. Their website currently shows that they officially released the mod for the 1.21.3 game version and also entered development for the 1.21.4 game version. On their website, they released a preview version of the mod for The Garden Awakens Drop.

Furthermore, on their official Discord server, one of their text channels showed that the development of the 1.21.4 OptiFine mod was 85% complete.

This proves that OptiFine might have pulled their socks up and started matching the pace with other performance mods and official Minecraft updates.

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