Sound Culling 2.0.0

Sound Culling 2.0 is a major rewrite focused on smarter sound prioritization, better performance under heavy audio load, improved compatibility, and a completely redesigned configuration experience.

Highlights

• New priority-based culling engine — sounds are evaluated using distance, direction, category, repetition, spatial density, source fairness, and priority instead of relying on simple limits.
• Adaptive audio pressure system — Sound Culling automatically becomes more aggressive as the number of sound events increases.
• Real pre-start culling — unnecessary sounds can be stopped before an audio channel is started, reducing wasted audio work.
• Spatial sound tracking — nearby sound sources are grouped into regions with neighbouring-cell awareness for more consistent behaviour near region boundaries.
• Per-source fairness — one noisy machine or repeated sound source is prevented from consuming the entire audio budget.
• Improved repeating and persistent sounds — looping and tickable sounds are managed separately with smooth dampening and recovery instead of being abruptly destroyed.
• Player sound protection — important player feedback such as attacks, hurt sounds, eating, drinking, and burping is protected from overly aggressive culling.

Configuration & UI

• Completely redesigned configuration UI with Overview, Performance, Live Sounds, and Advanced pages.
• Live Sounds inspector — see recently triggered sounds, trigger counts, and culled counts directly from the configuration screen.
• Per-sound rules — selected sounds can be marked as:
  • Never Cull
  • Critical
  • High Priority
  • Normal
  • Aggressive
  • Always Cull
• Protect Mod — create namespace-wide rules such as presencefootsteps:* directly from Live Sounds.
• Wildcard rule support — rules can target individual sounds, sound groups, or complete mod namespaces.
• Three presets — Balanced, Performance, and Aggressive, plus automatic Custom mode when settings are manually changed.
• Live statistics for sound rate, adaptive pressure, culled sounds, dampened sounds, and tracked regions.
• Localization-ready UI — configuration text now uses Minecraft translation keys.

Compatibility

• Improved Better Combat compatibility so important combat effects are not lost under audio pressure.
• Improved Sound Physics Perfected compatibility.
• Presence Footsteps compatibility including namespace protection.
• Fail-open safety — if Sound Culling encounters an unexpected compatibility error while evaluating a sound, vanilla playback is allowed instead of crashing the client.

Stability & Configuration

• Safer configuration loading — invalid or corrupted config files fall back safely instead of preventing the game from starting.
• 1.x configuration migration support.
• Tracker and allocation optimizations for heavy sound workloads.
• Debug and diagnostic improvements for troubleshooting complex mod interactions.

Testing

Sound Culling 2.0.0 was tested with:

• Heavy repeated sound loads
• Adaptive pressure and hard culling
• Per-source fairness
• Persistent/looping sounds
• Player attack and hurt feedback
• Eating, drinking, and burping sounds
• Better Combat
• Sound Physics Perfected
• Presence Footsteps
• Corrupted configuration recovery
• Fail-open runtime behaviour
• Namespace and wildcard rules
• Preset switching
• Real Fabric 26.1.2 release JAR smoke testing

Notes

• This release does not claim that every previously reported random crash is fixed unless the original issue can be reliably reproduced and verified.
• Sound Culling 2.0.0 currently targets Fabric on Minecraft 26.1.2.

Minecraft: 26.1.2
Loader: Fabric
Version: 2.0.0