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
- Connected Block Textures (CBT) - CTM (will not work with Sodium yet)
- To fix glass panes bottom/top go here.
- Colormatic - Custom colors
- CullLeaves - Adds culling to leaf blocks, similar to OptiFine's "Smart Leaves" option.
- 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)
- Fabrishot - Takes higher resolution screenshots.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
- Sodium allows toggling overworld terrain fog. (not in current releases, only in dev versions)
- ClearView
- NoFog
- CustomFog
- 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.
The mods listed below are not part of the OptiFine alternatives directly but those are still nice to have.
- Overworld Two provides an alternative optimized world generator for overworld and nether. Much faster than Vanilla but isn't identical to Vanilla.
- overlay textures
- custom entity models (might come in Vanilla 1.17)
- custom mojang logo
- Fishingline and Lead: Custom widths and textures.
- Lightmap: Custom lighting for the sun, torches, lighting and raining for the different dimensions.
Sodium and Canvas Renderer are incompatible. Sodium currently doesn't implement Fabric renderer API which makes some mods incompatible like CBT.
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 JellySquid's mod to be short), please check out her discord server.
If you need help related to LambDynamicLights or if you don't want to post in the comments a suggestion you can check out my own discord server