🌋 Vesuvio

Same picture, more frames. A performance mod for Minecraft's native Vulkan renderer.

Part of a family of Italian volcanoes: Etna (shaders) · Vesuvio (performance) · Stromboli (quality of life)

---

Vesuvio is a Fabric mod for Minecraft 26.4 snapshots on the game's own Vulkan renderer. It makes the game do less work for the same picture: it skips what you can't see, stops redoing work that hasn't changed, and uses less memory. It runs on its own or next to Etna, and Etna's shadows get faster with it too.

Made first for Apple Silicon Macs (MoltenVK), and meant to work on Windows and Linux as well.

Status: in development. Version 0.1.0 is being built. Each part below ships only once it has been checked in game.

Features

Rendering

• Draws only the block faces that can face the camera, so the graphics chip skips the ones turned away from you before doing any work on them.
• Hides leaf faces buried inside a canopy, keeping the outer layers you actually see.
• Skips mobs, chests, signs and particles hidden behind walls or outside your view.

Every frame

• Updates animated textures (water, lava, fire, portals) only when they are on screen.
• Lowers the frame rate while the game is in the background or minimised, and restores it the moment you come back.
• Smoother chunk loading when you move fast.
• On Macs: lets MoltenVK compile shaders in parallel, so new effects don't stall the game.

Memory and world

• Smaller block-state tables: less memory, fewer pauses for garbage collection.
• Faster world ticking in single player, with the game's rules exactly as in vanilla: same redstone, same mobs, same farms.

Install

1. Install Fabric Loader 0.19.5 or newer for Minecraft 26.4-snapshot-3, with Java 25.
2. Put vesuvio-<version>+mc26.4-snapshot-3.jar in your mods folder. Fabric API is not needed.

Builds are attached to each run of the build workflow.

Settings

Options > Video Settings > Vesuvio. Every optimization has its own switch and a short description, and F8 turns all of them on or off at once, so you can see the difference for yourself.

• Settings are saved in config/vesuvio.properties.
• With a switch off, that part of the game behaves exactly like vanilla.
• A built-in benchmark times the game with Vesuvio on, off, and with each part off in turn, and writes the table to logs/latest.log.

Every setting, explained: docs/settings.md · How to benchmark: docs/benchmark.md

Compatibility

• Needs the game's native Vulkan renderer. Sodium, VulkanMod and Nvidium replace that renderer, so they can't run together with Vesuvio.
• Works with Etna and Stromboli, and with mods that don't change how the world is drawn.

FAQ

Does it change how the game looks? No, not with the default settings. Leaf culling hides faces deep inside trees; you can turn it off or make it stronger.

Does it change how the game plays? No. The world-ticking speedups keep vanilla's rules exactly.

Something looks wrong or the game crashes. Press F8: if the problem goes away, turn the optimizations back on one by one to find the culprit. If the game won't start, put the name of the part in disabledMixins in config/vesuvio.properties (the crash report names it). Then please open an issue.

Do I need Etna? No. Vesuvio works with any look, vanilla included.

Credits and licence

MIT licence, see LICENSE. Code taken from other projects and the techniques Vesuvio follows are listed in CREDITS.md.