BS Better Create 4 Life — 1.0.9

This is mainly a performance release. If you were getting low FPS, this update is for you. It also makes Ultimine far easier to unlock.

The big one: dynamic lights

Profiling a live session showed that Sodium Dynamic Lights was consuming 54% of the entire render thread, more than every other mod in the pack combined.

Every time the game asks "how bright is this spot?", and it asks for every particle, every frame, the mod checks that spot against every dynamic light source nearby. Every glow item frame counts as a permanent light source, and so do glow squids, dropped torches and item frames holding a lantern. The profiled base had 58 glow item frames and a lot of campfire smoke, so each frame did thousands of particles × 60+ light sources worth of distance checks.

Changes:

• Entity light sources disabled. This is the fix: the list of sources drops from dozens to just the players, so the per-particle check becomes almost free. A follow-up profile confirmed it: 54% → under 3%.
• Lighting mode REALTIME → FAST, block-entity light sources disabled. These only change how often lit chunks are rebuilt; they are a small extra, not the fix.

A torch or lantern in your hand still lights your way, for you and for other players. What no longer glows: glow item frames, glow squids, blazes, burning mobs and torches dropped on the ground. You can turn entity lights back on in Video Settings → Dynamic Lights if your machine has headroom.

Shaders: off by default, and cheaper when you turn them on

oculus.properties shipped with enableShaders=true, which meant every single installer had shaders forced on from the first launch, whether their machine could handle them or not. That was never intentional.

• Shaders now default to off. Turn them on any time in Video Settings → Shader Packs.
• The configured shader pack pointed at ComplementaryReimagined_r5.3.zip, a file that is not in the pack. It now points at the bundled Complementary Reimagined r5.9.3.
• Bundled shader packs updated: Complementary Reimagined and Unbound → r5.9.3, BSL → v8.4.
• Added Colorwheel. Without it, turning shaders on made Create's renderer (Flywheel) switch off GPU rendering entirely, so every spinning shaft, cog and belt was redrawn on the CPU every frame. A profile taken in a built-up town showed Create machines alone at 24% of frame time with shaders on. Colorwheel keeps them on the GPU. The bundled Complementary Reimagined and Unbound (updated to r5.9.3) support it fully. The bundled BSL runs in Colorwheel's best-effort fallback mode, which can show visual glitches on Create machines.

Shaders still cost frames of their own: the shadow pass alone was 12% in the same profile. If you need more FPS with shaders on, lower the shadow distance in the shader pack's settings first.

Distant Horizons

• Fixed distant terrain popping in and out. Trees and structures far away would appear and vanish as you moved. The generator was set to Features, which produces exactly this behaviour and is also documented as unreliable alongside worldgen mods, and this pack has Twilight Forest, IDAS and When Dungeons Arise. Both the distant generator and the chunk generator are now set to Full (Save Chunks). Singleplayer; on a multiplayer server these options are controlled by the server.
• Render distance, transparency and biome blending are unchanged. Distant Horizons was never the bottleneck in any profile, so there was no reason to reduce visual quality. If you play with shaders and still need frames, lowering its render distance in the Distant Horizons settings is a good next step.

Other performance work

• Removed Farsight. It kept chunks beyond the server's view distance loaded on your client (a profiled client held 1664 chunks where the server only sent ~729). Distant Horizons already draws the far terrain, so every extra chunk was pure cost: more Create machines to draw, more shadow work, more memory. You can delete the leftover farsightpreview folder in your instance.
• Added Dynamic FPS. The game throttles itself while it is in the background or minimised, so alt-tabbing no longer keeps your PC working at full load.
• Embeddium chunk builder threads were pinned to 4. Now set to automatic, so the game uses all the cores you actually have.
• Sound Physics ray budget reduced: 32 → 16 environment rays, 4 → 2 bounces, 16 → 8 occlusion rays, processing distance 512 → 256 blocks. Reverb still works; it is simply computed at lower resolution. Every Create machine is a continuous sound source, so this adds up fast in a factory.
• Entity Texture Features texture update frequency Fast → Average.
• Removed leftover config files for mods that are no longer in the pack.

Ultimine is much easier to unlock

Ultimine Addition used to require four Mining Skill Cards, each levelled up through ten challenges in a Skills Record, before you could craft the Miner Certificate. That was far more grind than intended. It now runs in Legacy mode:

1. Craft a Miner Certificate: paper in the centre, diamond pickaxe above, iron axe left, golden hoe right, stone shovel below.
2. Keep it in your inventory and mine 64–128 ores (the exact number is on the tooltip).
3. Right-click it. Ultimine is now unlocked permanently, for every tool.

Mining Skill Cards and the Skills Record are disabled in this mode. The tier-based block limit is gone as well; the limit is now 48 blocks for everyone, with the usual hunger and XP cost.

Recommended client settings

These live in the CurseForge launcher and in your own video settings, not in the pack, so the update cannot apply them for you.

Memory: 10 GB. More is not better. A profiled client with a 16.7 GB heap on a 32 GB machine had the whole system at 26 of 32 GB RAM, which leaves Windows paging instead of the game running smoothly. It was also pausing for garbage collection 65 ms every 2.8 seconds on average.

If you use custom JVM arguments, these are sane for a client:

-XX:+UseG1GC -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=35 -XX:G1HeapRegionSize=16M
-XX:G1NewSizePercent=20 -XX:G1MaxNewSizePercent=40 -XX:G1ReservePercent=15
-XX:+ParallelRefProcEnabled -XX:+DisableExplicitGC

Do not copy server tuning guides ("Aikar's flags") into a client. In particular drop -XX:+AlwaysPreTouch, which claims the whole heap at startup and starves the rest of your system.

Render distance: 10–12. Distant Horizons draws everything beyond that.

If you are still short on frames: set Particles to Decreased and turn VSync off.

Still being worked on

• A ClassCastException spam from Create: The Factory Must Grow whenever your crosshair is on an entity (a mob, item frame or armour stand, goggles or not). Root cause identified and reported upstream; it cannot be fixed from inside the pack.

Updating

If you play on a server, it needs to be on 1.0.9 as well. Better Compatibility Checker will warn you on join if the versions do not match.