How to Get More FPS in Minecraft, In Order

What is the fastest way to boost Minecraft FPS?

Install two mods and change three settings, in that order. Sodium replaces the rendering engine and gives you the largest single jump. Lithium makes the simulation cheaper so the frame times stay flat. Then you tune render distance, VSync, and Graphics. That is the whole path, and most of the gain lands in the first step.

People tend to do this backwards. They spend an hour fiddling with vanilla sliders, claw back five frames, and never install the one mod that would have doubled them. Settings are the last 10 percent. Mods are the first 90.

The ordered FPS path

Do these in sequence. Each step assumes the one before it is done.

1. Set up Fabric and Fabric API

   Sodium and Lithium are Fabric mods, so you need the loader first. Install the Fabric loader for your Minecraft version, drop Fabric API into your mods folder, and launch once to confirm the Fabric profile boots clean. New to this? The Fabric setup walkthrough covers it click by click.

2. Install Sodium

   This is the step that moves the needle. Sodium swaps the vanilla renderer for a modern one that draws the world far more efficiently. On weaker hardware it routinely doubles frame rates on its own. Add it to mods, launch, and you will feel the difference immediately, before you change a single setting.

3. Add Lithium

   Lithium optimizes the parts Sodium ignores: mob pathfinding, entity physics, block ticking, the simulation side of the game. It changes nothing you can see. What it removes is the periodic hitch when a lot of entities are active or chunks are doing work. There is no downside and no reason to skip it.

4. Tune the three settings that still count

   With the mods in, a few vanilla options are worth a pass. Lower render distance if your GPU is the bottleneck; even one or two chunks fewer cuts the draw load. Turn VSync off if you want frames above your refresh rate. Set Graphics to Fast for a quick, free bump. Leave the rest of the sliders alone unless you are chasing a specific problem.

Why these two mods over endless settings tweaks

Sodium and Lithium attack the two real sources of lag, and vanilla settings cannot reach either one. Rendering and game logic are baked into the engine; the options menu only exposes a few crude levers. The mods rewrite the slow code paths directly, which is why a single install beats a full afternoon of slider-twiddling.

If you want the deeper bench, the best performance mods rundown covers what to add after these two once you have headroom to spare.

What to skip and what to watch for

Skip OptiFine if raw FPS is the goal. Sodium is the faster renderer for modern versions, and the two do not coexist. The Sodium vs OptiFine breakdown walks through the trade. Also skip stacking ten "optimization" mods at once. Sodium plus Lithium covers the ground that matters; piling on more rarely adds frames and only complicates troubleshooting when something breaks.

One natural aside: if you are juggling Fabric setups across several servers and want the mods, profiles, and settings managed in one place instead of a mods folder you hand-edit, that is the kind of grind Terminus is built to take off your plate.

Still lagging after all this?

If frames are still rough, the problem is usually a different one: a memory or hardware ceiling, a background process eating CPU, or a stutter pattern rather than a low average. Diagnosing the common causes of Minecraft lag sorts the GPU-bound case from the CPU-bound one, and the stuttering guide targets the intermittent hitches that a higher average FPS hides.