Async Screenshot

Taking a screenshot can freeze the game for a noticeable moment. This mod moves the heavy work — PNG encoding and writing the file to disk — off the render thread, so pressing F2 no longer causes a frame hitch.

Client-side only. Works on Fabric, Forge, and NeoForge. No config needed.

Why you might want this

When you press the screenshot key, vanilla Minecraft encodes the image to PNG and writes it to disk right on the render thread. That freezes the frame for tens of milliseconds. Taking screenshots in quick succession — burst capture, recording, or just mashing F2 — makes it worse, especially at high resolutions or with large resource packs.

How it works

The render thread grabs the pixels from the GPU (that part has to stay there), then hands everything else off to a background thread: generating a unique filename, encoding the PNG, and writing the file. A semaphore makes sure concurrent screenshots don't collide on the same filename. When the write finishes, the "Saved screenshot" message is delivered back on the main thread, just like vanilla.

If the mod can't hook into your game version, it disables itself and screenshots behave exactly like vanilla.

Install

1. Install Fabric, Forge, or NeoForge for your Minecraft version.
2. Put the jar file in your mods folder.
3. Launch the game. Nothing else to configure.

Classic Forge users: you also need MixinBooter installed, since classic Forge doesn't ship with a Mixin loader.

Requires Java 17 or later.

Compatibility

Tested on Minecraft 1.18 through 26.2 across Fabric, Forge, and NeoForge. If the mod can't hook into your specific version, it disables itself quietly — the game runs as if the mod weren't there.

Limitations

• The render thread still grabs the pixels from the GPU (that's required by OpenGL), so a tiny hitch can remain at very high resolutions.
• The "Saved screenshot" message appears after the background encoding finishes, so it may be slightly delayed.
• If a screenshot is still being saved when a new one is taken, the new one is dropped to prevent file collisions.