Smart Particles

🛡️ Smart Particles is a lightweight client-side optimization mod designed to improve frame-rate stability in particle-heavy environments.

Instead of simply preventing new particles from spawning when Minecraft becomes overloaded, Smart Particles intelligently manages active particles by prioritizing effects that are closer to the player and more relevant to what you can actually see.

It works with both vanilla particles and particles added by other mods.

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✨ Features

Smart Particle Culling:
Instead of randomly deleting particles, Smart Particles evaluates particle distance relative to the player and prioritizes keeping nearby effects. Less important distant particles are removed first when the configured limit is exceeded.

Smart Camera Culling:
Particles significantly outside the camera view can be removed early, reducing unnecessary particle processing behind or away from the player.

🧠 Pro tip: If you notice unwanted particle pop-in while Smart Camera Culling is enabled, you can disable it independently while still keeping the global particle limit active.

Hard Cap Protection:
Prevents extreme particle counts from overwhelming the client by enforcing a configurable maximum number of active particles.

This can help reduce FPS drops caused by:

• Large explosions
• Mob farms
• Weather effects
• Particle-heavy biomes
• Modded spell effects
• Particle emitters
• Heavily modded environments

Performance Optimized:
Smart Particles is designed to keep its own processing overhead low.

Recent versions include:

• Lightweight O(n) processing while particle counts remain below the configured limit
• Reduced temporary memory allocations
• Cached camera and FOV calculations
• More efficient particle position checks
• Reduced temporary object retention
• Improved handling of very large particle counts

The more expensive nearest-particle selection logic only runs when the configured particle limit is actually exceeded.

Fully Configurable:
The default particle limit is 5,000, but you can increase or decrease it depending on your hardware, modpack, and preferences.

Mod Menu Integration:
Fabric users can optionally install Mod Menu for convenient access to the Smart Particles configuration screen.

Client-Side:
Smart Particles runs entirely on the client. Servers do not need the mod installed.

Compatibility:
Designed to work alongside other mods that add or modify particles. Most mods using Minecraft's normal particle system should work without additional configuration.

Mods tested and compatible with Smart Particles:

• Particle Effects
• Particle Moths
• Particle Rain
• Particle Tweaks
• Particle Core
• Particular
• Visuality
• Particle Interactions
• Effective
• Subtle Effects
• Falling Leaves
• Cave Dust
• Wakes
• Vanilla Fireflies
• Cool Rain
• Better Combat
• Async Particles
• ...and more!

Almost all mods using Minecraft's standard particle system should be compatible.

⚙️ Configuration

You can adjust the particle limit through the in-game configuration screen where supported, or by editing the configuration file directly.

• Default Particle Limit: 5000
• Smart Camera Culling: True by default

Modern config location:

.minecraft/config/smart_particles/config.json

Older Smart Particles versions may use:

.minecraft/config/smartparticles.cfg

The older config path is only relevant to older Minecraft releases.

📦 Fabric

Required:

• Fabric Loader

Optional:

• Mod Menu for easy access to the configuration screen

Fabric API and Cloth Config are not required by Smart Particles on Minecraft 26.2.

Some older Smart Particles releases may have different dependency requirements, so check the requirements for the specific file you are downloading.

📦 NeoForge

NeoForge versions only require the appropriate NeoForge loader.

The Smart Particles configuration screen is integrated with the Mods menu.

📦 Forge

Older Forge versions only require the appropriate Forge loader, unless otherwise specified on the individual release.

🚀 Minecraft 26.2 Performance Improvements

The Minecraft 26.2 release includes several internal optimizations:

• Added a faster processing path when the current particle count is below the configured limit
• Reduced temporary allocations during particle processing
• Reused camera direction data instead of recreating it every tick
• Cached FOV calculations until the player's FOV changes
• Reduced repeated particle-coordinate lookups
• Improved cleanup of temporary particle-selection data
• Improved memory behavior after lowering the configured particle limit
• Added protection against invalid or excessively large configuration values
• Improved recovery from malformed configuration files

These changes are designed to reduce the amount of work Smart Particles performs during normal gameplay while preserving its intelligent particle-prioritization behavior.

🔧 Supported Loaders

Smart Particles has releases available for:

Fabric • NeoForge • Forge

Loader availability depends on the Minecraft version you are using.

📖 Open Source

Smart Particles is open-source and available under the MIT License.

Feel free to:

• Use it in modpacks
• View and modify the source
• Distribute modified versions in accordance with the license
• Report issues or compatibility problems

If you enjoy the mod, please consider supporting the project!