🎧 Sound Culling

Sound Culling is a lightweight client-side Minecraft mod that reduces unnecessary sound processing and audio clutter in noisy areas.

Instead of simply muting sounds when too many are playing, Sound Culling intelligently decides which sounds should play normally, be dampened, or be culled.

🚀 Sound Culling 2.0

Sound Culling 2.0 is a major rewrite with a new priority-based engine, adaptive sound pressure, live sound inspection, per-sound rules, presets, and a completely redesigned configuration UI.

It is especially useful around:

• Large farms
• Piston machines
• Mob grinders
• Crowded multiplayer areas
• Machinery-heavy builds
• Sound-heavy modpacks

✨ What's New in 2.0

• Priority-Based Culling — evaluates distance, direction, category, repetition, spatial density, source fairness, player relevance, and current audio pressure.
• Adaptive Audio Pressure — automatically becomes more aggressive as sound activity increases.
• Pre-Start Culling — low-priority sounds can be rejected before Minecraft creates an audio channel for them.
• Per-Source Fairness — one noisy machine or repeating source cannot consume the whole sound budget.
• Persistent & Looping Sound Support — looping and tickable sounds can be smoothly dampened and recover when pressure decreases.
• Player Sound Protection — important sounds such as attacks, hurt sounds, eating, drinking, and burping are protected from overly aggressive culling.
• Wildcard Rules — target exact sounds, sound groups, or complete mod namespaces.
• Fail-Open Safety — if Sound Culling encounters an unexpected compatibility problem while evaluating a sound, vanilla playback is allowed instead of crashing the client.
• Safer Config Loading — invalid or corrupted configuration files fall back safely.
• 1.x Config Migration — older configuration values are migrated where possible.

🖥️ Redesigned Configuration UI

Overview

Quickly control the master toggle, presets, adaptive engine, and live session statistics.

Performance

Tune adaptive thresholds, category limits, and performance behaviour.

Live Sounds

Inspect recently triggered sound IDs, trigger counts, and culled counts directly in-game.

You can select a sound and assign rules without manually editing JSON files.

Available actions include:

• Never Cull
• Critical
• High Priority
• Normal
• Aggressive
• Always Cull
• Protect Mod
• Clear Rule

Advanced

Fine-tune region tracking, spatial behaviour, priorities, and diagnostic settings.

🎯 Sound Rules

Sound Culling 2.0 supports rules for exact sounds and entire mod namespaces.

Examples:

minecraft:block.piston.*

bettercombat:*

presencefootsteps:*

These rules can be created directly from the Live Sounds page.

⚙️ Presets

Balanced

Recommended for most players.

Reduces excessive repetition while keeping the soundscape natural.

Performance

Stronger limits for farms, machinery, and large modpacks.

Aggressive

Maximum reduction during very heavy sound activity.

Custom

Automatically selected when individual settings are changed manually.

🛡️ Compatibility

Sound Culling 2.0 has been tested with:

• Better Combat
• Sound Physics Perfected
• Presence Footsteps

It also protects important vanilla player feedback sounds and includes fail-open behaviour for unexpected compatibility problems.

📦 For Modpack Authors

Sound Culling is modpack-friendly.

It is a lightweight, fully client-side mod and requires no server installation, making it easy to include in client-side, optimization, and general-purpose modpacks.

• Fully client-side — players can use it without any server-side dependency.
• Lightweight — designed specifically as an audio optimization utility.
• Vanilla-friendly — does not add blocks, items, mobs, or gameplay mechanics.
• Compatibility-focused — includes fail-open behaviour and configurable per-sound/mod rules.
• Configurable — Balanced, Performance, Aggressive, and Custom presets allow different pack styles to choose the behaviour that fits them.
• Open source — released under the MIT License.
• Actively maintained — compatibility and sound behaviour continue to be improved.

You are welcome to include Sound Culling in your modpack.

If your pack contains a mod with unusual sound behaviour, compatibility can also be tuned through exact sound rules, wildcard rules, or Protect Mod.

📊 Live Statistics

The 2.0 configuration screen can show:

• Sound events per second
• Adaptive audio pressure
• Culled sounds
• Dampened sounds
• Tracked regions
• Recent sound trigger counts
• Recent sound cull counts

The configuration screen does not pause single-player worlds, so statistics can continue updating while you inspect them.

📥 Installation — 2.0

1. Install Fabric Loader
2. Install Fabric API
3. Place Sound Culling in your mods folder
4. Launch Minecraft

Mod Menu is optional, but recommended for easy access to the configuration screen.

Sound Culling 2.0 Supported Versions

• Minecraft 26.1
• Minecraft 26.1.1
• Minecraft 26.1.2
• Minecraft 26.2

Loader: Fabric

Minecraft 26.1.x and 26.2 use separate Sound Culling builds. Always download the file that matches your Minecraft version.

🕰️ Legacy Versions

Older Sound Culling releases are still available for previous Minecraft versions and loaders.

These versions use the legacy Sound Culling engine and legacy configuration system. They do not include the full Sound Culling 2.0 feature set.

Depending on the version, legacy releases may be available for:

• Fabric
• Forge
• NeoForge
• Older Minecraft versions

Legacy versions are intended for players who cannot use the current 2.0 release.

Legacy Feature Set

Legacy releases focus on the original Sound Culling behaviour:

• Overlapping sound limits
• Category-based limits
• Volume dampening
• Direction-aware prioritization
• Basic region-based culling
• In-game configuration where supported

Features such as the Live Sounds inspector, adaptive audio pressure, per-source fairness, wildcard rules, Protect Mod, 2.0 presets, persistent loop management, and the redesigned four-page UI are 2.0 features and may not exist in legacy releases.

When downloading an older file, always check the Minecraft version and loader listed on that file's page.