(Sodium) Sightline

(Sodium) Sightline

Sodium already skips chunks you cannot see. Sightline handles what is left: the mob behind the wall, the chest round the corner, the faces between leaf blocks, sign text too far away to read and the particle flood in a storm. Client only.

Occlusion culling

• Entities and block entities fully hidden behind opaque blocks are not drawn. Raycasts on a background thread check each one every 75 ms, up to 96 blocks away.
• Everything starts visible and is only skipped after a confirmed "hidden": an unchecked target or an unloaded chunk keeps drawing.
• Exempt: anything within 12 blocks, glowing entities, the ender dragon and other very large ones, anything just hit, Sable and LittleTiles builds, everything during Iris’s shadow pass.
• Block entities whose own box is off screen are skipped too; vanilla and Sodium only cull them by chunk section.

Distance trims

• Nameplates draw up to 48 blocks away (vanilla 64), sign text up to 24. The sign itself always draws.
• Item frames and dropped items stop at 48 blocks; more types can be capped in the config file.
• Entity and block entity render distance scales as a percentage of each type’s own, down to 20%.

Leaves and particles

• The faces between two leaf blocks of the same type are left out; across leaf types is an option. A change shows after a chunk rebuild (F3+A).
• Above 3 000 live particles, new ambient ones (rain, splash, smoke, spores) are dropped with rising probability, all of them from 4 500. Other particles are never touched.

Debug overlay

The overlay counts what was occluded, trimmed and shed each tick, and lists any hook that did not attach.

Requirements

Minecraft 1.20.1 (Forge or Fabric), 1.21.1 or 26.2 (NeoForge or Fabric), on Java 17, 21 and 25 respectively. The Fabric builds need Fabric API. Client only. Sodium is optional: on 1.21.1 and 26.2 the options are two pages in its video settings (Reese’s Sodium Options too); otherwise in config/sightline-client.toml, or config/sightline.json on Fabric.

This mod has been abandoned. It works fine, but it will not receive updates.

Related mods

The other performance mods

NeoForge 1.21.1 and 26.2, Fabric 1.20.1, 1.21.1 and 26.2, Forge 1.20.1. Client only. Free to use in modpacks.