Tuning the FPS HUD, Zoom, Dynamic Lighting, and Quality-of-Life Options in Sodium Extras

guide

Sodium Extras bundles a set of performance and comfort settings that you adjust through its interface rather than through crafting or items. This guide covers the FPS and memory readout, zoom controls, dynamic lighting, true darkness, entity and block entity distance limits, and several smaller toggles.

FPS and Memory Display

The FPS counter shows your current frame rate. An advanced mode adds your lowest frame rate plus a fifteen-second average, which helps you judge whether a change actually helped. You can place the counter in a corner of your choice and apply an offset to fine-tune where it sits. Enabling the memory option puts memory and GPU figures next to the frame rate. Use Text Shadow Box draws a shadowed box behind the readout in the same plain style as the F3 screen.

Zoom Behavior

Zoom has several adjustable parts. Zoom Smoothness in Millis spreads the field-of-view change across a set number of milliseconds; set it to `0` to remove the animation. A separate easing exponent controls how the smoothing animation accelerates — larger values feel quicker, and `1` turns easing off. If you raise the exponent, raising the smoothness time as well is suggested. A squaring option makes field-of-view differences more even, and it is best left on if the math is unclear to you. You can set a default starting zoom percentage. A toggle option decides whether the zoom key acts as a switch or only works while held. Cinematic Camera can be enabled during zoom; if you turn it off, setting the smoothness time to `0` is also advised. A minimum mouse sensitivity value keeps sensitivity from dropping too far while zoomed — `1.0` stops any change, which is not recommended without cinematic zoom. The zoom in/out keys and scroll zooming share a speed setting. Scroll zooming lets you adjust zoom with the mouse wheel while zoom is active, and it blocks hotbar scrolling during that time.

Dynamic Lighting

Dynamic lighting can be shown on block entities such as furnaces and modded machines, and on entities such as dropped items and mobs. Both can sharply raise the number of lighting updates, even when you are nowhere near a furnace or not holding a light source. Light Updates Speed sets how frequently dynamic lights refresh; recalculation is costly, so slower values perform better.

True Darkness

True darkness makes the world realistically dark without affecting daytime or torch light, and it defines what counts as true darkness. It can be applied in the Overworld, the Nether, the End, dimensions without skylight, and other dimensions — the last of these is marked for removal in favor of a blacklist. Nether and End fog brightness can each be configured while darkness is on. An option disables sky, fog, and moon brightness so blocks become the only light source, and another makes darkness respond to moon phases. New Moon Bright (min) and Full Moon Bright (max) set the brightness at the darkest and brightest moon phases.

Entity and Block Entity Limits

Use Max Entity Distance hides entities past a configured limit. The horizontal value stops entities beyond a set number of blocks from being shown or ticked, which helps greatly around modded farms. The vertical value does the same for entities below a set depth, helping above caves; it should ideally be lower than the horizontal value. Equivalent settings exist for block entities, with the same horizontal and vertical behavior and the same advice about the vertical value.

Other Toggles

Hide JEI Until Searching keeps the item list hidden until you search; pressing space searches everything.
Cloud height can be raised and configured.
Chunk Fade In Quality controls fade-in speed with no performance cost; Fancy takes longer but looks nicer, and it currently does not work.
Static chest models replace the animated chest, helping in chest-heavy rooms, though the option has no effect when flywheel batching or instancing is active.
Static bed models replace the dynamic bed, improving performance and allowing custom resource pack models.
Overworld-only fog removal is available when disabled.
Disabling text shadows gives a flat look and raises FPS depending on how much text is on screen.
Borderless Fullscreen on F11 can attach borderless mode between windowed and fullscreen, replace fullscreen with it, or be turned off.
Fast Language Reload reloads only language resources instead of everything.

Display mode choices are Windowed, Borderless, and Fullscreen.