🌊 Water Optimisation

Water Optimisation is a client-side Fabric and NeoForge mod that reduces unnecessary water rendering work in Minecraft.

It is mainly useful in water-heavy areas like oceans, flooded caves, large farms, underwater builds, and scenes with lots of water particles.

The mod does not change how water behaves. It only changes how some water is rendered on your client.

What it does

Water Optimisation currently focuses on three main areas:

Hidden water blocks

Minecraft can still spend time processing water blocks that are completely surrounded and cannot be seen.

The mod can detect safe cases like this and skip the rest of the rendering work for that water block.

It only applies to normal source water in situations where the block is fully hidden.

Flowing water, waterlogged blocks, transparent blocks, visible surfaces, and unusual cases use Minecraft's normal rendering instead.

Reduced water geometry

The Maximum FPS profile can remove some extra inward-facing water geometry that Minecraft normally generates.

The normal visible water face is still rendered.

This can reduce translucent geometry and GPU overdraw in large water-heavy scenes.

Because this is a more aggressive optimisation, it is only enabled in the Maximum FPS profile. Some unusual underwater or transparent views may look slightly different.

Water particles

The mod can also reduce or disable water-related particles such as:

• bubbles

• splashes

• underwater particles

• dripping water

• falling water

• bubble-column particles

You can also limit how far away water particles are allowed to appear.

This can help in areas where lots of particles are being created at once.

Performance profiles

Water Optimisation includes four presets.

Vanilla

Disables the mod's water rendering optimisations.

Useful for testing or comparing performance.

Balanced

Keeps things conservative and close to vanilla.

Good if you mainly want the mod installed without aggressive changes.

Performance

Enables the safer performance options, including hidden-water optimisation and stronger particle settings.

Recommended for most users.

Maximum FPS

Enables the strongest available settings, including reduced water geometry.

Use this if you want the lowest possible water rendering workload and do not mind small visual differences in unusual situations.

Settings

If you use Mod Menu, you can open the Water Optimisation settings directly from the mods screen.

You can change things like:

• performance profile

• hidden-water optimisation

• reduced water geometry

• water particles

• particle distance

• fog particle filtering

• performance diagnostics

You can use the presets or configure individual options yourself.

Sodium

If Sodium is installed, Water Optimisation does not try to replace or interfere with Sodium's fluid renderer.

Its vanilla water-rendering hooks are disabled automatically when Sodium owns fluid rendering.

Particle-related features can still work.

Diagnostics

There is also an optional diagnostics HUD for testing.

It can show things like:

• hidden water blocks skipped

• water faces removed

• rejected particles

• fluid rendering time

• section compile time

• translucent sorting time

This is mainly useful for checking whether the mod is actually doing something in a specific scene.

For normal gameplay or proper FPS testing, you should keep diagnostics disabled.

Client-side only

Water Optimisation does not need to be installed on the server.

It does not change:

• water physics

• water flow

• collision

• player movement

• world generation

• networking

• server behaviour

• saved worlds

You can use it as a normal client-side performance mod.

Where it can help

You are most likely to notice a difference in areas with a lot of water, for example:

• oceans

• large pools

• underwater bases

• flooded caves

• waterfalls

• water farms

• large enclosed water volumes

• particle-heavy underwater areas

The actual FPS improvement depends on the scene and your hardware.

Some optimisations mainly reduce CPU work during chunk rebuilding, while others reduce GPU work from water geometry and particles.

There is no fixed FPS increase, so the best way to test it is to compare the same scene with the mod enabled and disabled.

Compatibility

• Minecraft 26.2, 26.3, 1.21.1, 1.21.11

• Fabric, NeoForge

• Client-side only

• Mod Menu supported

• Sodium-aware

• MIT licensed

• Open source

Water Optimisation is meant to do one thing well: reduce unnecessary water rendering work without changing Minecraft gameplay.