CLODIUM ECOSYSTEM — v0.1 RELEASE NOTES
Release date: 14 October 2026
Target: Minecraft 26.3
Loader: Fabric Loader 0.19.5
Java: 25
Extra dependencies: NONE (Fabric API is not required)
Total size: 258 KB across 6 jars
WHAT THIS IS
Clodium is a performance ecosystem that removes work Minecraft does but you
never see. It consists of five independent mods, each targeting a different
bottleneck. There is no bundle forcing you to take everything — install the
one you need and skip the rest.
The design principle is simple: stop work whose result never reaches your
screen. An entity behind a wall should never enter the render stage. A smoke
particle 60 blocks away should run its physics at half speed, because the
difference is invisible. A chunk upload queue that is backing up should have
that frame skipped.
This is the first release. It is not a placeholder, but some settings are
deliberately absent, and the section "NOT IN THIS RELEASE" below explains
exactly why.
PACKAGE CONTENTS
1. clodium v0.1 — Main performance mod (59 KB)
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The core of the ecosystem. Cuts invisible work before it reaches the render
stage rather than after.
Entity culling .............. ON | Cull entities beyond the set distance
Entity distance ............ 96 blocks | 0 means no limit
Entity occlusion ........... ON | Ray trace; hide if terrain blocks the view
Occlusion delay ............ 400 ms | Delays hide to prevent edge flicker
Entity cap ................. 500 | Hard ceiling of entities drawn per frame
Block entity culling ....... ON | Chests, furnaces, signs, hoppers
Block entity distance ...... 64 blocks | 0 means no limit
Block entity occlusion ..... ON | Hide block entities behind terrain
Particle spawn gate ........ ON | Refuse particles spawning out of sight
Particle distance .......... 48 blocks | 0 means no limit
Particle amount ............ 70% | The remainder never get created
Chunk upload throttle ...... ON | Defer a frame when the queue is backed up
Rebuild threshold .......... 8 | Queue length considered overloaded
Show counter ............... OFF | On-screen count of work removed
Implementation: 7 mixins. EntityRenderDispatcher.shouldRender for entities,
BlockEntityRenderDispatcher.tryExtractRenderState for block entities,
ParticleEngine.createParticle for particles, and
SectionRenderDispatcher.uploadTerrainBuffersToGpu for chunk uploads.
Occlusion uses DDA voxel traversal with a 256-step safety bound. Only fully
opaque blocks count as occluders; leaves, glass, fences and similar
transparent blocks never block the ray, otherwise visible entities would
disappear.
IMPORTANT — The occlusion ray cast budget adapts to your frame rate. If your
FPS is low, ray casting is disabled; if it is high, it is enabled. The
reasoning: ray casting is CPU work whose benefit is on the GPU. On a fast
machine that already has headroom, doing the work costs you frames for no
gain. This way the mod silences itself rather than degrading your framerate.
2. photon v0.1.0 — Simulation load (34 KB)
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Reduces particle simulation cost. Unlike render-side work, this happens on
the CPU and has no visible effect at all.
Throttle particle simulation .... ON | Far particles update at half rate
Particle physics distance ...... 32 blocks | 0 means no limit
Simulation interval ............ 2 ticks | Full physics every N ticks
Lifetime correction matters here. If a particle's age does not advance while
its tick is skipped, it lives forever and accumulates on screen. So the age
is still advanced on skipped ticks; only the physics integration is omitted.
Particles still die on schedule.
Implementation: a single @Redirect on ParticleGroup.tickParticle.
3. vanadium v0.1.0 — GPU side (47 KB)
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On integrated GPUs the bottleneck is almost always fill rate: the number of
pixels pushed to the screen.
Instant chunk fade .......... ON | Chunks appear immediately instead of fading
Auto scale distance ......... OFF | Reduce render distance when FPS drops
Target FPS .................. 60 | Goal for auto scaling
Minimum distance ............ 4 chunks | Floor for auto scaling
The chunk fade transition means blending a new chunk's alpha channel every
frame. It looks cheap but has a real cost, especially on wide displays.
NOTE: This setting writes only to the copy used during rendering. Your
vanilla option value is not modified, so the number shown in the vanilla
settings screen stays unchanged.
Auto scaling never changes more than one chunk per second. Dropping eight
chunks in a single frame feels like a teleport. Going back up requires
exceeding the target by 12 FPS, otherwise the value oscillates and produces
a distracting "breathing" effect.
4. ferrite v0.1.0 — Memory (20 KB)
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READ THIS BEFORE INSTALLING: this mod does NOT increase FPS and does NOT
reduce memory usage. It measures and displays only.
The settings screen shows three live values:
Heap usage ................. Current memory in MB
Session peak ............... Highest value reached this session
JVM limit .................. Maximum the JVM allows
The only setting is "Check interval" (default 60 seconds), which controls how
often the measurement runs.
Why it is this limited: in 26.3 the path to the chunk cache could not be
resolved. Dropping that cache directly risks corrupting world state on a
wrong call, and a performance mod is not permitted to break memory. Measuring
and showing the truth is strictly better than doing nothing.
What it will never do: call System.gc(). A full GC freezes the cycle, drops
your FPS, and prints a warning on modern JVMs.
5. cobalt v0.1.0 — Storage (43 KB)
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This mod does not increase FPS. It prevents your disk from filling up and
slows long-running sessions from degrading.
Trim old logs ............... ON | Prunes the logs folder
Log files to keep ........... 5 |
Trim crash reports .......... ON | Prunes the crash-reports folder
Trim caches ................. ON | Prunes the screenshots folder
Screenshots to keep ......... 200 |
Cleanup interval ............ 300 seconds |
The settings screen also shows the LAST CLEANUP result — how many files were
removed and when — so you can confirm the settings are taking effect.
SAFETY POLICY — this mod touches exactly three folders:
logs/
crash-reports/
screenshots/
It NEVER touches: saves/, mods/, config/, resourcepacks/, worlds/ — your
worlds and settings are treated as untouchable.
Deletion only ever removes the oldest files, and only when the file count
exceeds your limit.
6. clodium-api v1.0.0 — Shared library (55 KB)
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No user-facing features. This is the infrastructure the other five mods build
on.
Contains:
- The shared dark/red theme
- Settings screen framework (row layout, scrolling, switches, sliders)
- Mod registration system
- Config read/write
- Client lifecycle hooks
It replaces three Fabric API calls (ClientTickEvents, ClientLifecycleEvents,
HudElementRegistry) with its own mixins, which is why the entire ecosystem
runs WITHOUT Fabric API. That saves 1.7 MB of dependency.
INSTALLATION
Required: clodium-api — all five performance mods depend on it.
Installing any mod without it will fail with:
Missing mandatory dependencies clodium-api
If you are installing more than one mod, install clodium-api as well.
FABRIC API IS NOT REQUIRED
This is a deliberate design decision, not an oversight. The Sodium ecosystem
does not require Fabric API either; it relies purely on mixins. Requiring
1.7 MB to deliver three event hooks would have been a poor trade.
NO KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS
These mods deliberately never touch your key bindings. The single access
point is:
Options -> Video Settings -> Clodium
That screen lists your installed mods on the left and the selected mod's
settings on the right. One click to switch between mods.
ABOUT FPS GAINS — PLEASE READ
Being straight with you: the gain is not a fixed number. It depends entirely
on your scene.
Particle-heavy scenes (portals, campfires, TNT, mob farms)
-> Noticeable improvement.
Crowded multiplayer servers
-> Significant improvement, especially from entity culling.
Empty open terrain
-> Little to no gain, and in some scenes a very small cost, because
occlusion tests run against nothing.
Low render distance
-> Limited gain, since there was never much work to remove.
To measure for yourself, open the clodium settings screen and turn on
"Show counter". A small readout in the corner of your screen shows how much
work Clodium removed that frame. Test it in your own scenes, on your own
machine.
NOT IN THIS RELEASE
These were deliberately left out. Showing a setting that does nothing is
worse than not showing it — you would assume it was working.
- Entity interpolation throttling (photon)
Target method could not be resolved in 26.3.
- Distant block entity tick throttling (photon)
tickBlockEntities does not exist on the client side in 26.3.
- Skip clouds / freeze water animation / skip parallax (vanadium)
The implementation was never written. These settings existed in an earlier
build, appeared in the UI, saved to config, and did nothing. They were
removed rather
Ferrite 0.1 Team
