Sodium Chloride Guide to Entity Distance Limits and FPS Optimizations

guide

Sodium Chloride bundles a set of rendering and simulation controls aimed at raising frame rates, and the most impactful group concerns how far away entities, monsters, and block entities are allowed to exist. All of these are handled through the mod's own interface rather than any crafting recipe.

Entity, Monster, and Block Entity Limits

Three separate toggles govern whether distance culling is applied at all: Max Entity Distance, Max Monster Distance, and Max Block Entity Distance. Turning one on makes the game hide the relevant category once it passes the configured limit. Entities are ranked by how close they are to you when the limit is applied.

Each of the three categories has two numeric fields:

Entities Max Distance (Horizontal) — anything past this many blocks is neither drawn nor ticked. This is described as a large performance gain, particularly near modded farms.
Entities Max Distance (Vertical) — anything below you past this many blocks is neither drawn nor ticked, which helps when you are above caves. Setting it lower than the horizontal value is recommended.
Monsters Max Distance (Horizontal) — same idea for hostile mobs; a big win around XP farms.
Monsters Max Distance (Vertical) — skips monsters beneath you by this many blocks. Keep it under the horizontal figure.
Block Entities Max Distance (Horizontal) — skips block entities past this many blocks, which matters most when many modded machines are loaded.
Block Entities Max Distance (Vertical) — skips block entities below you by this many blocks, useful above caves. Again, lower than the horizontal value is advised.

One caveat is shown on screen: if VSEureka or Sable is detected, the vertical (raw) distance is disregarded and the horizontal (squared) distance is used instead.

Nametags

Nametag rendering can be switched off per category: Nametag on Players, Nametag on Entities, and Nametag on Item Frames. Disabling the last one also stops nametags for items held inside item frames.

FPS Overlay

The overlay can be turned on, and an advanced mode adds minimum FPS plus a 30-second average, which helps when judging performance. Show RAM and GPU usage adds memory and graphics usage beside the counter. Placement is controlled by Fps Horizontal Alignment, Fps Vertical Alignment, Fps Horizontal Margin, and Fps Vertical Margin. A shadow box can be added behind the text in the style of the debug screen.

Text, Fog, and Sky

Fast Language Reload reloads only language data instead of every resource. Disabling text shadows flattens text and raises FPS depending on how much text is on screen, especially with BetterF3-style mods. Hide JEI/REI/EMI until Searching keeps the item list hidden until you search; typing a space reveals it without a search, and the hint message can also be hidden.

Fog can be removed per dimension (Overworld, Nether, End) or globally, and custom fog values let you set the start, end, and shape. Void Horizon Height sets the Y level where the dark void plane begins; 63 matches vanilla, while -64 removes the half-dark sky below sea level.

Other Visual Options

Solid chest models replace chest models with static blocks; this does nothing when EBE and Flywheel are present.
Solid bed models do the same for beds and may break modded beds.
Leaf culling reduces visible faces of the same leaf type, with a depth control.
Chunk fade in makes chunks fade as they load.
True darkness options apply darker attenuation, with per-dimension toggles, moon-phase influence, and brightness values for new and full moons.
Rain particles, rain drop floor particles, block cracking particles, and block breaking particles can each be switched off.
Zoom can be enabled and used via its hotkey, with a mouse-wheel maximum; it is disabled if JustZoom or Zume is detected.

Window mode offers WINDOWED, BORDERLESS, and FULLSCREEN, and borderless optimization can be force-disabled by the driver to stop black flickering when leaving the game, though a large frame drop is possible.