Entity Culling | Stop Rendering What You Can't See

Mob farm builders, megabase dwellers and anyone who plays on busy survival servers know this pain. You stare at a wall and your FPS tanks anyway, because Minecraft is still rendering every mob and block entity hiding on the other side of it. Entity Culling was built for exactly that problem. It runs asynchronous path-tracing on your spare CPU cores to work out what you can actually see, then skips everything else before it becomes a draw call. With more than 130 million downloads and steady updates, it has become a quiet staple in performance-minded mod folders.

Line-of-Sight Culling on Your Spare CPU Cores

Vanilla only skips what is behind your camera. Anything in front of it gets rendered, walls or not. Entity Culling fixes that with path-tracing. Every few ticks it collects the data it needs on the main thread, then hands the visibility math to other CPU cores, so the game never stalls waiting for an answer. The checks update in real time as you move, which keeps pop-ins to a minimum.

Coverage reaches 64 blocks in every direction, a cube that roughly lines up with vanilla's Entity Distance setting. Anything farther away is handled by plain distance culling. The mod also errs on the side of caution, so an entity pressed right against a wall may still render even when it technically should not. How much you gain depends on your surroundings. Quiet plains will barely show a difference, but a base ringed with farms, a packed server lobby or a mob-filled cave can improve drastically, since every hidden entity means a skipped draw call.

Tick Culling That Never Touches Your Farms

Rendering is only half the cost. Entities you cannot see still tick on the client, and a hidden pen full of villagers, items or armor stands quietly eats CPU time. Entity Culling's tick optimization cuts that client-side impact too, and it is fully configurable and compatible with most mods.

The part survival players care about: none of this touches the server. Tick culling is limited to the client-side world, so server-side simulation runs exactly as before. Mobs keep spawning, moving and dropping loot. Your iron farm produces at full speed with the mod installed, and nobody else on the server sees any difference in behavior.

Config Screen, Whitelists and the Leaves Option

Every feature can be toggled in the config screen. It lives under the tr7zw Library Modules entry in Mod Menu, which the Libraries filter at the top can hide, so check that if the option seems missing.

The whitelists are the settings most players end up touching. Entities and block entities that should never be culled or tick-culled go on their own lists. That matters for block entities rendering well beyond their normal bounds, like the vanilla beacon, pulleys from Create and certain Botania blocks. Client-side entities that magic mods use for animations can also misbehave, so whitelist those IDs if an effect vanishes when it should not.

The leaves option deserves attention too. If you play with fast graphics or a bushy-leaves resource pack, you can have the mod treat leaves as solid blocks for culling, which pays off in forested areas.

Testing is built in. Bind the debug key in the controls menu and you can toggle the mod on and off mid-game, no restart needed. One heads-up while comparing numbers: the F3 entity counts, which you can unhide with F3+F6, are internally collected and may not match actual render counts, and active shaders inflate them through shadow rendering. On a very old machine whose CPU is already maxed out there is no spare time for the visibility math, so leave the mod off there. Outside that case it should never hurt, and at worst does nothing when there is nothing to cull. If you are stacking optimization mods, our Xenon guide covers another one that earns its slot.

How to Install Entity Culling

Entity Culling is client-side only and actively maintained, with builds for Fabric, Forge, NeoForge and Quilt, plus Lunar Client support. Nothing gets installed on a server, even for multiplayer worlds.

1. Pick the jar for your loader from the download table on this page.
2. Drop it into your mods folder. Never unzip it.
3. If that folder does not exist yet, run the game once with your loader installed and it will appear inside .minecraft.
4. Launch the game. The mod works immediately with no setup.
5. Open the controls menu and bind the debug key so you can toggle culling during play.
6. Tune whitelists and the leaves option in the config screen under Mod Menu whenever you need to.

Entity Culling FAQ

Does Entity Culling need to be on the server?

No. It is a fully client-side mod and does not need to be installed on the server at all.

Does it still help if I already use Sodium?

Yes. Sodium's built-in entity culling does a quick check based on visible chunks, so entities inside a visible chunk but out of sight still render. This mod runs true line-of-sight checks per entity, which is more aggressive and more accurate, so the two stack well.

Will it affect my mob farms or mob behavior?

No. The mod only skips rendering. Mobs keep spawning, moving and dropping items as expected, and tick culling is limited to the client-side world, so server-side simulation is untouched.

Can I put Entity Culling in my modpack?

The mod ships under the author's protective license. Packs on the approved hosting platform are explicitly allowed, while other hosts, custom clients and re-upload sites need permission. The terms are on the official project page.

Entity Culling asks almost nothing from your system and hands frames back in exactly the spots that hurt most. If you are new to modding, our how to install Minecraft mods guide and Fabric loader guide cover the setup, and for a different kind of boost our Lossless Scaling guide walks through an upscaling tool that works outside the game.

Screenshots: tr7zw · via Modrinth