Main Banner. The Words Particle Core over an expanse of bubble particles.

Particle Core focuses on one thing: Optimizing particles. Vanilla Minecraft is quite inefficient with particles in a variety of ways. Particle Core aims to improve this.

What Does It Do?

Culling

The biggest performance improvement overall, Particle Core doesn't render particles you can't see. Makes sense! Only about a 12th of the lightbox is visible at standard FOVs, why render the 11/12 of particles you can't even see?

Rendering Optimizations

Particles that are rendered are optimized. Vertex transformations and lightmap polling are optimized. Vertex optimizations defer to Sodium.

By-Type Reduction or Disabling

Three methods are provided to either completely disable or reduce spawning of specific particle types. Any particle you can add via the /particle command is eligible.

A particle_type tag. Add particle types to particle_core:excluded_particles to completely disable those particle types. Server Owners: this will disable those particles for every client that joins the server, use with caution!
Config-based by-type reduction map. In the particle core config (see below), a user can add mappings of particle type identifier to chance double.
Turn of Potion Particles entirely. If you find potion particles on your screen annoying, head over to the config and turn them off!

Unlike invis-particle resource packs, this actually prevents the particles from spawning at all, improving performance.

Tweaking Vanilla settings

Two config options are provided that can fine-tune the standard vanilla options of ALL, DECREASED, and MINIMAL. One is effectively a dial between ALL and DECREASED, the second a dial between DECREASED and MINIMAL. If you simply want to tweak particle spawning a bit, for example if your computer runs fine with DECREASED but you personally don't like how many particles are still on screen, you can dial DECREASED back without going all the way to MINIMAL.

Config

Particle Core provides a config covering every feature added. locate the config in the standard .mincraft config folder. Config name is particle_core_config_v[x].json, where [x] is the current version number.

The config has a comprehensive "comment" section at the top of the file. Please read it for guidance on config usage.

turnOffPotionParticles

To some, potion particles are extremely annoying. Use this setting to turn them off.

reduceParticlesAllChance

A dial to tweak particle spawning between the ALL and DECREASED Minecraft setting.

reduceParticlesDecreasedChance

A dial to tweak particle spawning between the DECREASED and MINIMAL Minecraft setting.

disableParticles

Completely disable all client-side particle spawning.

reduceParticlesByType

Map to reduce specific particle spawning.

key: identifier of the particle type, ex. minecraft:smoke.
value: double between 0.0 and 1.0. 0.0 will completely disable the particle, 1.0 is normal spawning. Anything in between will be that fractional chance a particle succeeds at spawning.

disableOptimizations

If any feature in Particle Core is causing a conflict or it is simply undesired, every feature can be individually disabled by adding it's string key to this list. See comment for instructions.

Before

Without Particle Core, world rendering is at 41% of CPU time, with renderParticles the lions share of that at 25% of CPU time.

Screenshot of a Spark Profile showing world rendering at 41% CPU time

After

With Particle Core, rendering is now at only 16% of CPU time, particle rendering basically a non-item.

Screenshot of a second Spark Profile showing world rendering at 16% CPU time

With Sodium

Improves performance over Sodium by itself. Top section of the screenshot with Particle Core, the bottom section is without it. About 5% CPU time improvement, or 50% relative improvement.

Screenshot of two spark profiles overlaid. The top shows particle rendering at 11%, the bottom shows it at 17%