ShadowLOD

By
Hardek

More FPS, with or without shaders, without altering how your game looks.

More FPS, with or without shaders, without changing how your game looks.
Crafted by Hardek

About

ShadowLOD makes Minecraft lighter and smoother to render, with or without shaders. Distant mobs turn into flat pictures of their own model, far block entities and particles are skipped, chunk loading causes lesser stutter, and with shaders on, shadows are only drawn where you can see them. It basically means that your world looks almost the same, your graphics card just does less work.

Features

Smart shadows : objects only go into the shadow map when their shadow can land somewhere you can see.
Shadow cache : the terrain shadow is kept and reused until something changes, and updates are spread over several frames to avoid stutter.
Distant mob LOD : beyond 32 blocks, mobs are drawn as flat pictures of their real model, up to 128 blocks.
Render distances : adjustable limits for block entities, particles and translucent sorting.
Smooth frames : chunk loading is spread over frames and slowed down right after a lag spike.
Auto tuning : when the frame rate drops below your target, some distances go down a little on their own.
Thread priorities : the render thread comes first, world generation and Distant Horizons work in the background.
Any shader pack : packs that need a safer setup are detected automatically. (Such as Euphoria Patches, or RayTraced Shaders for exemple)

Results

Same spot, same settings, frame rate set to Unlimited. Only the mod is turned off (left) or on (right).

Scene	Off	On	Gain
🧱 Wall on a flat world	150 FPS	260 FPS	×1.73
🏘️ Village house	44 FPS	147 FPS	×3.34
🏰 Village with a tower	58 FPS	157 FPS	×2.71
🛒 Market with villagers	75 FPS	90 FPS	×1.20
🌙 Village at night	154 FPS	186 FPS	×1.21
🐄 Pen with 130 cows, far away	12 FPS	236 FPS	×19.7

Ryzen 7 9800X3D, Radeon RX 9070 XT, 1440p, Photon shaders, Distant Horizons. Your results depend on the scene and your hardware.

Village house, off and on

Village with a tower, off and on

Pen with 130 cows, off and on

Wall on a flat world, off and on

Market with villagers, off and on

Village at night, off and on

Compatibility

Mod	Status	What works	Not yet
Embeddium	✅	Everything
Oculus (all shader packs)	✅	Everything
Distant Horizons	✅	Everything
C2ME	✅ ²	Everything
Entity Model Features / Fresh Animations	✅	Everything
Physics Mod	✅	Everything
Entity Culling	✅ ¹	Everything
Faster Iris Shadow Mapper	✅ ¹	Everything
ImmediatelyFast, ModernFix, FerriteCore	✅	Everything
Luxium	🟧	Distant mob LOD, render distances, smooth frames	Shadow culling and shadow cache ³
Create	🟧	Everything for the rest of the world	Create machines and contraptions ³
Vanillin / Flywheel	🟧	Everything for the rest of the world	Chests, bells and minecarts drawn by Vanillin ³

✅ Fully works.

🟧 Works, some features are not applied yet.

¹ Recommended alongside ShadowLOD, they cover different parts of rendering.

² C2ME threads get a lower priority so world generation does not take frames from rendering. Remove "c2me" from lowPriorityThreads to give it full speed.

³ Dedicated support is planned in a future update.

Requirements: Minecraft 1.20.1, Forge 47 or newer. Embeddium and Oculus are optional.

Installation: drop the .jar into your mods folder, or install it with the CurseForge app.

Settings

Numpad / : turn the mod on or off.
Numpad * : turn the shadow optimizations on or off.
F3 : live stats for every feature.

All settings are in the mod menu, or in config/shadowlod-client.toml.

Even more FPS: these settings trade a bit of visual quality for speed.

Setting	Default	Faster	What you lose
`occlusion`	false	true	Hides terrain behind hills and buildings. Slight pop-in when the camera moves fast.
`shadowUpdateInterval`	1	2	Shadows update every other frame and can lag behind when you turn.
`shadowTerrainPercent`	100	70	Distant terrain stops casting shadows sooner.
`shadowEntityDistance`	16	8	Mobs further away lose their shadow.
`sunStepDegrees`	0.25	1.0	Shadows move with the sun in visible steps.
`impostorDistance`	32	24	Mobs turn into pictures closer to you.
`maxEntityDistance`	128	96	Mobs disappear sooner.
`maxBlockEntityDistance`	32	24	Chests, signs and banners disappear sooner.
`maxParticleDistance`	40	24	Particles disappear sooner.