Why?
OptiFine was originally a great mod offering many quality of life improvements for player in the beginning. However, over the years, its benefits have dwindled and has caused many issues for modders. This is due to Minecraft's codebase improving over the years and OptiFine's aggressiveness towards replacing entire swaths of code while being closed source making it very difficult to figure out why OptiFine has broken another modder's mod. Also worth noting that OptiFine natively doesn't support Fabric and it's hard to maintain OptiFabric.
In the modern Minecraft era, with Fabric's community effort, modders have begun to create alternatives for most of OptiFine's features to allow players to maintain better performance, better mod compatibility, and better support.
OptiFabric: A note about the 1.16 crashes
Alternatives
- Connected Block Textures (CBT) - CTM (will not work with Sodium yet)
- To fix glass panes bottom/top go here.
- Chime - CIT replacement with a custom format. Allows for extensive item model variation based on different predicates.
- Colormatic - Custom colors
- LambDynamicLights - Dynamic lighting
- LambdaBetterGrass - Better grass and better snow.
- Raised Clouds & Soaring Clouds - Configurable cloud height
- Varied Mob Textures - Random entity textures (uses own format, not currently compatible with OptiFine format)
- FabricSkyboxes - Custom skybox (not currently compatible with OF format)
- CullLeaves - Adds culling to leaf blocks, similar to OptiFine's "Smart Leaves" option.
- Fabrishot - Takes higher resolution screenshots.
- Custom Splash Screen - Change the resource loading screen with custom colors/logo/progress bar.
- Dark Loading Screen - Change the resource loading screen to be darker by default but support custom colors like OptiFine does.
- Splash - Change the resource loading screen to be darker by default but support custom colors like OptiFine does.
- Transparent - Allows transparent textures useful for custom paintings and other stuff.
Performance
Client
- Sodium - performance improvements (even better than OptiFine) but no "fancy" options (if you want "fancy" options look for Canvas Renderer)
- Canvas Renderer - shaders and performance improvements
- Cull Particles - unneeded if Sodium is installed.
- Dynamic FPS - Reduces renders when unfocused to decrease CPU/GPU usage.
General
- Lithium - server optimizations (useful in singleplayer).
- Phosphor - lighting engine performance improvements (incompatible with Starlight).
- Starlight - rewrite of the lighting engine (incompatible with Phosphor), currently in Beta.
No Dynamic FOV
As of 1.16.2 and above, this is now a vanilla feature under the accessibility settings. If you are playing in 1.16.2 or above, the mods for this feature are irrelevant.
Those are client-only mod that prevents Minecraft from changing the FOV in all situations.
Fog
- Sodium allows toggling overworld terrain fog. (not in current releases, only in dev versions)
- ClearView
- NoFog
- CustomFog
Shaders
- Canvas Renderer
- Iris - A new shaders mod for Minecraft intended to be compatible with existing ShadersMod/Optifine shaders.
Note: Sodium is not compatible with any mods in this section.
Zoom
Extras
The mods listed below are not part of the OptiFine alternatives directly but those are still nice to have.
- Hydrogen - Reduces the memory usage of the game in more modded scenarios
- Krypton - A mod to optimize the Minecraft networking stack
- LazyDFU - Makes the initialization of DataFixerUpper "lazy". DataFixerUpper (or DFU for short) is the system used by Minecraft to convert old worlds to the current version you're running, in Vanilla it's initialized at startup and is slow (and eats a lot of resources). This mod delays the initialization of DFU by initializing only when needed, if you're playing only on multiplayer it'll never get initialized for example.
- Overworld Two provides an alternative optimized world generator for overworld and nether. Much faster than Vanilla but isn't identical to Vanilla.
Missing
- overlay textures
- custom entity models (might come in Vanilla 1.17)
- Fishingline and Lead: Custom widths and textures.
Compability
Sodium and Canvas Renderer are incompatible. Sodium currently doesn't implement Fabric renderer API which makes some mods incompatible like CBT.
Need help?
If you need help installing any of these mods feel free to ask in the fabric discord server in the player-support channel.
If you need help about Sodium, Lithium, Phosphor (any of CaffeineMC's mod to be short), please check out CaffeineMC's discord server.
If you need help related to LambDynamicLights, LambdaBetterGrass, or if you don't want to post in the comments a suggestion you can check out my own discord server
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What does CBT stand for? (I don't like the usage of acronyms, it leads to "what does this stand for?" questions.)