Clumps | Merge XP Orbs, Cut Lag

Load a world with Clumps installed and the first thing you notice is what stops happening. Clear out a mob farm and instead of dozens of glowing orbs drifting around your feet, they collapse into a few large ones that vanish the instant they touch you. Your screen stays clean and your levels tick up in one satisfying burst. That is the entire pitch, and it has earned the mod around 42 million downloads since it first showed up in 2017. It comes from Jaredlll08, the author behind CraftTweaker, and it is still actively maintained today.

Why XP Orbs Lag Your Game

Every experience orb is a real entity. Your client has to render each one and your server has to tick each one, so a grinder that kills hundreds of mobs between pickups creates hundreds of tiny objects doing nothing useful. Hoppers make this worse in a sneaky way. A standard farm collects the item drops but ignores the XP, so orbs pile up in the exact spot where your item system runs busiest.

Clumps attacks the problem by grouping nearby orbs into a single entity that carries the combined value. One orb model to render instead of fifty. One entity to tick instead of fifty. Players noticed the difference from day one, and hosting guides recommend it specifically for cutting entity load on busy servers.

Instant Pickup With No Orbs in Your Face

The second feature is pure quality of life. In vanilla, orbs drift toward you and linger in a swarm until each one gets collected. Clumps makes the player absorb them the moment they make contact, so nothing floats around blocking your view mid-fight.

The payoff scales with the size of the drop. Player showcases have demonstrated the Ender Dragon's entire XP reward consolidating into one giant orb that gets collected instantly, handing over every level in a single pickup. Even without boss fights, the difference on a long farm session is obvious. You come back to a clean floor instead of a carpet of green.

A Drop-In Jar With Nothing to Configure

Some mods hand you a config file with twenty sliders. Clumps has no documented config options at all. Drop the jar in and it works, which is exactly what you want from a background performance fix. There are no required dependencies either, so it will not drag extra libraries into your instance.

Development is active, with the latest update landing in September 2026. If you like keeping a lean instance, this is the kind of mod that adds function without adding weight.

How to Install Clumps

If you have never added a mod before, read our full guide on how to install Minecraft mods first, then come back for the specifics.

1. Install a mod loader. Clumps runs on Fabric, Forge, and NeoForge, and we have a dedicated guide for each of them.
2. Download the Clumps jar from the official project page and make sure the file matches your loader.
3. Playing on your own client? Drop the jar into your .minecraft/mods folder. That is the entire setup.
4. Running a server? Stop it, upload the jar to the server's mods folder through your file manager or FTP, then restart. Watch the console for a clean startup and you are done.

On recent versions of Minecraft, a server-side install alone is enough. Older versions need it on both sides.

Clumps FAQ

Does Clumps go on the client, the server, or both? On recent Minecraft versions, only the server side is required. Older versions need the mod installed on both sides. If you play by yourself, a client-side install covers everything. On a multiplayer server, one server-side install benefits every player who connects.

Will Clumps fix lag on my server, my client, or both? Both. Fewer orb entities means less rendering work for your client and less entity ticking for your server. The gains show up wherever the orbs were piling up.

Is there a config file to change how orbs merge? No. No configuration options are documented for the mod, so there is nothing to tune. If you see a merge radius setting mentioned in search results, it belongs to a different project with a similar purpose.

Does Clumps work with other mods and modpacks? Generally yes. The only documented conflict report involved Cyclic back in 2019, and it traced to that mod teleporting XP orbs of its own. The rule of thumb is that mods which manually spawn or move XP orbs are the most likely to clash, so test those combinations. Everything else, modpacks included, treats it as a normal drop-in.

Clumps is the sort of mod you forget is running until you notice how clean your farms look. If you want more tweaks in the same spirit, our Vanilla Refresh review covers a full set of quality-of-life additions.