Sodium Extras Overview: How to Open and Navigate Its Settings

guide

Sodium Extras is a performance-focused utility mod that adds extra rendering, entity, lighting, and display controls on top of Sodium. It is operated entirely through its settings interface and hotkeys rather than through crafting or items. This guide explains how to open that interface and what you will find inside it.

Opening the Settings Interface

Sodium Extras is configured through its own settings screens, reached from the mod list or the standard mod configuration entry point in the game's menu. Once open, the settings are grouped into sections covering entity and block entity culling, true darkness, the FPS display, dynamic lighting, chunk fade, zoom behaviour, and general performance toggles. Hotkeys referenced by these features are assigned in the controls menu — no key is bound by default, so set the corresponding hotkey there yourself.

Entity and Block Entity Distance

These options cut down on work the game does for objects far from you.

Use Max Entity Distance — when enabled, entities are hidden according to a configured distance limit.
Entities Max Distance (Horizontal) — entities past this many blocks are hidden and no longer tick. This gives a large performance gain, particularly near modded farms.
Entities Max Distance (Vertical) — entities below this many blocks are hidden and no longer tick, which helps when you are above caves. Keep this lower than the horizontal value.
Use max Block Entity Distance — when enabled, block entities are hidden according to a configured distance limit.
Block Entities Max Distance (Horizontal) — block entities past this many blocks are hidden. This is a big gain around large numbers of modded machines.
Block Entities Max Distance (Vertical) — block entities below this many blocks are hidden, useful above caves. Keep this lower than the horizontal value.

True Darkness

This group makes unlit areas more realistically dark without affecting daytime or torch light, and controls what counts as true darkness.

Enable on Overworld, Enable in Other dimensions (a warning notes this will later be replaced by a blacklist), Enable on SkyLess dimensions, plus Nether and End toggles, decide where true darkness applies.
Nether Fog Brightness and End Fog Brightness adjust fog brightness in those dimensions when darkness is on.
Additional toggles disable sky, fog, and moon brightness so blocks become the only light source, and let darkness respond to moon phases.
New Moon Bright (min) and Full Moon Bright (max) set the brightness at the darkest and brightest moon phases.

FPS Display and Dynamic Lighting

The FPS display shows current FPS; its advanced mode adds minimum FPS and a 15-second average. You can set its corner position, offset, and enable memory and GPU usage beside it.
Use Text Shadow Box adds an F3-style shadow box to the display.
Dynamic lighting can be enabled separately for block entities and for entities, though both can sharply increase lighting updates. Light Updates Speed controls how often dynamic lights refresh; slower values perform better.

Rendering, Zoom, and Misc

Chunk Fade In Quality controls fade-in speed with no performance cost, though it is currently not working.
Static chest and bed models can replace the animated ones for performance; the chest option has no effect with Flywheel batching or instancing active.
Overworld fog can be removed, and text shadows disabled for a flat style and higher FPS.
Window mode options cover Windowed, Borderless, and Fullscreen, and Borderless Fullscreen on F11 configures how that attaches (ATTACH, REPLACE, or OFF).
Zoom settings include cinematic zoom, minimum sensitivity, zoom speed, scroll-to-zoom, Zoom Smoothness in Millis, easing exponent, squaring the zoom percentage, default zoom percentage, and a toggle mode.
Fast Language Reload reloads only language resources instead of everything.
Hide JEI Until Searching hides the JEI item list until you search; pressing space searches for everything.