Per-Block Toggles in Better Block Entities: Optimize Chests, Shulkers, Signs, Pots, Banners, Bells, Beds, Campfires, and Lecterns

guide

Better Block Entities (BBE) lets you control optimization and animation for individual block entity types through its settings interface. Each block type has its own switch, so you can speed up the blocks you have in bulk while leaving others untouched.

Master Control

The main tooltip setting acts as a global switch. Turning it on or off enables or disables BBE together with every optimization it provides. Use this when you want to compare vanilla behaviour against optimized rendering, or when you need to rule BBE out while troubleshooting.

Shading Method

A separate tooltip option selects the shading approach used for optimized block entities. Sodium is one choice, and it may produce nicer results because it calculates ambient occlusion and lightmaps for each corner rather than each face. The trade-off is that a noticeable difference can appear while a block entity switches between vanilla rendering and Sodium rendering.

Per-Block Optimization Toggles

Each of these settings turns optimization on or off for one block type only:

Optimize Chest — chests
Optimize Shulker Box — shulker boxes
Optimize Sign — signs
Optimize Decorated Pot — decorated pots
Optimize Banner — banners
Optimize Bell — bells
Optimize Bed — beds
Optimize Campfire — campfires
Optimize Lectern — lecterns

Disabling one of these leaves the other block types optimized.

Per-Block Animation Toggles

Animations are controlled separately from optimization:

Animate Chest — chest animations
Animate Shulker Box — shulker box animations
Animate Bell — bell animations
Animate Decorated Pot — decorated pot animations

You can keep a block optimized while turning its animation off, or the reverse.

Sign Rendering Options

Signs have several dedicated settings beyond the basic toggle:

Sign Text — turns rendering of sign text on or off entirely.
Sign Text Render Distance — sets the distance in blocks at which sign text begins to render.
Sign Text Backface Culling — skips drawing sign text on the side facing away from you.
Sign Text rotation — rotates the banner canvas or flag to a preset position.

A tooltip setting decides which renderpass banners use. Fast corresponds to cutout, while Fancy corresponds to translucent.

Chest Appearance

A tooltip setting toggles Christmas textures for chests on or off.

Animation Persistence

Extra Render Passes decides how many additional render passes a block entity stays in its animating state after the animation has finished.

Update Scheduling

A tooltip setting chooses the update scheduler. Smart updates block entities based on several factors, including visibility, and performs no direct updates. Fast updates immediately.

How to Operate These Settings

All of the options above are changed through the mod's interface rather than through crafting. Open the interface, locate the setting by its name, and toggle or adjust it. If a setting is bound to a hotkey, use the corresponding hotkey (set it in the controls menu) to trigger that action.