Aetherium (Fabric)

# Aetherium

 

**A client-side performance and video-settings mod for Minecraft 1.16.5 → 26.3 (33 versions), on Fabric.**

 

Aetherium replaces the vanilla *Video Settings* screen with its own animated, tabbed screen, and adds performance features that work *with* Minecraft’s renderer. It targets OpenGL 3.0, so it runs on low-end PCs and on Android launchers (Pojav / gl4es) as well as desktop GPUs.

 

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## ✨ Video settings screen

 

– An animated, tabbed screen with six pages: **General, Quality, Performance, Backend, Effects, Android**

– **Dark and light themes**, smooth scrolling with a thick draggable scrollbar, and optional UI sounds

– Hover any option to get a **description popup** explaining what it does

– **Presets** and a master on/off switch

– Options a Minecraft version can’t support are greyed out and marked *”not on this version”*. Nothing is hidden or faked.

 

## ⚡ Performance

 

– **Aetherium renderer** (on by default, every version): solid and cutout chunk meshes are grouped by face direction, and each chunk section draws only the faces that can point at you. It **never uses more draw calls than vanilla**, and it falls back to vanilla automatically if anything goes wrong.

– **Even frame pacing:** with a max framerate set, frames are spaced evenly instead of drifting, so the game feels smoother at the same FPS

– **Entity culling and occlusion culling:** entities you can’t see are skipped

– **Smart chunk culling:** chunk sections hidden inside the distance fog are neither drawn nor meshed

– **Fast particles, fast mob models, visible-only animated textures** (on supported versions)

– **Smooth chunk loading:** chunk rebuilds and network work are spread across frames to cut stutter

– **Threaded chunk building**, with an adjustable number of worker threads

– **Adaptive render distance**, block-entity distance, entity cull distance and particle density

– **Frame-time overlay** with FPS, average frame time and **p99** (the slowest 1% of frames), plus an optional stutter log

 

## 🎨 Quality

 

– **Fog:** distance, start, clear water, clear lava

– **Sky:** sky, stars, sun and moon, cloud height

– **Particles by type:** weather, block break, combat, explosions, fire, smoke, portals, potions, drips, totem, ambient

– Weather and vignette toggles

 

## 🔦 Effects

 

– **Dynamic lights:** held items and glowing entities light up their surroundings

– **Fullbright**, with adjustable strength

– **Zoom**, with smooth animation, scroll-to-zoom, cinematic camera and third-person zoom. Zoom, Zoom In and Zoom Out are all rebindable.

– **Freelook:** look around without turning your character, in toggle or hold mode

 

## 📱 Android

 

– Built-in support for mobile launchers: renderer selection, memory budget, touch mode

– **Battery saver** with an FPS cap, and a **thermal guard** that lowers the frame cap when the phone gets hot

 

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## 📦 Installation

 

| Loader | What you need |

|—|—|

| **Fabric** | Fabric Loader only. **Fabric API is not required.** |

 

– Download the file that matches **your exact Minecraft version**. Each file is built for one Minecraft version only.

– **Client-side only.** Servers don’t need it, and you can join any server with it.

 

## ⚠️ Compatibility

 

– Don’t combine it with other renderer replacements such as **Sodium, Embeddium, Rubidium or OptiFine**. Aetherium detects them and warns you.

– If you see missing terrain faces or other rendering glitches, turn off **Video Settings → Backend → Aetherium renderer** and report the issue with your Minecraft version.

– On 1.21.5 and newer the renderer is new. Reports are very welcome!

 

## 🐞 Bug reports

 

Please open an issue on GitHub (https://github.com/entitybrian69-bit/aetherium/issues) with:

1. Minecraft version

2. Your device (PC or Android launcher, GPU)

3. The log (`logs/latest.log`) and, for crashes, the crash report

 

## 📜 Credits & license

 

– Licensed under **LGPL-3.0-only**. Source code: https://github.com/entitybrian69-bit/aetherium

– Zoom behaviour is inspired by [Zume](https://modrinth.com/mod/zume). It was reimplemented independently, with no code copied.