(Sodium) Sightline

Sodium already skips chunks you cannot see. Sightline handles what is left: the mob behind the wall, the chest round the corner, the inside faces of every leaf in a forest, sign text you cannot read from here, and the particle flood at a campfire.

It will not pop things in front of you

Anything it is unsure about keeps drawing - something it has not checked yet, a chunk that is not loaded, a check that ran long. When Sightline is wrong you get a few frames of extra work, never a mob appearing out of nothing.

The debug overlay also lists any hook that failed to attach, so a broken update shows up as a line of text rather than as a mystery.

What it trims

Nameplates     48 blocks (vanilla 64)
Sign text      24 blocks (the sign itself always draws)
Item frames    48 blocks
Dropped items  48 blocks
Particles      3000 live, then ambient ones start thinning

Distances scale as a percentage of vanilla rather than a flat radius, so a bat and an ender dragon keep their proportions.

Leaves

Vanilla draws every leaf's inside faces even where they are buried against the next leaf. Sightline drops them. Changing the option needs a chunk rebuild (F3+A) before you see it.

What it leaves alone

Anything glowing, bosses, whatever you are riding, anything that just took a hit, Sable and LittleTiles builds - and everything during Iris's shadow pass.

Two pages in Sodium's video settings.

What you need

• Client only. NeoForge 1.21.1, plus Fabric and Forge for 1.20.1, 1.21.1 and 26.2.
• Sodium optional - it just hosts the settings.

The rest of the series

Related mods

Client-only, NeoForge 1.21.1. Free to use in modpacks.