Entity Culling finally has a 26.3 build. It arrived on 19 September as 1.11.0, and it was replaced the next day by 1.11.1 for a reason worth knowing about before you install either: mobs were going invisible and then snapping across the ground.
Why this one mattered
Entity Culling is one of the most installed client mods in existence – roughly 167.8 million downloads and over 17,000 followers – and it was one of the last big performance mods still stuck on 26.2 after Wilderness Bound.
Most of the stack moved within a day of the drop. Sodium, Lithium and Fabric API went almost immediately. This one took four days, which on a mod that hooks entity rendering this deeply is not unreasonable, and the hotfix a day later shows why.
What it actually does
Minecraft already skips rendering things behind the camera. It does not skip things in front of the camera that a wall is blocking. Entity Culling adds asynchronous path tracing to work out which entities you genuinely cannot see and stops rendering those.
The gain scales with clutter. A flat field with three cows gets nothing. A base full of item frames, armour stands and villagers behind walls, or a busy server where dozens of entities sit inside buildings, is where it is worth double-digit frame rates.
It is client-side only – required on the client, unsupported on the server – so it goes on any server, vanilla included.
The 1.11.1 hotfix
1.11.0 shipped with a 26.3-specific bug: missing interpolation of tick-culled entities. The visible result was entities disappearing and then moving in jumps rather than smoothly, which generated three separate issue reports within a day.
1.11.1 also fixed compatibility with older NeoForge versions, and added a rule that reads like something learned the hard way – never cull the local player, which was causing crashes.
If you grabbed a build on the 19th, update. The symptom is distinctive enough that you will recognise it: mobs that vanish at the edge of a doorway and reappear several blocks from where you expected them.
Where it fits with the rest
Entity Culling occupies a different slot to everything else in a typical 26.3 client stack, which is why it stacks cleanly.
- Sodium rewrites terrain rendering.
- Entity Culling removes entity draw calls for things you cannot see.
- MoreCulling handles block-face culling, a separate problem.
- ImmediatelyFast batches GUI and HUD rendering.
None of those overlap. The only thing to be careful about is Entity Culling alongside other mods that also hook entity rendering, which is a smaller list than it used to be. The reasoning behind the whole category is in our explainer on culling and frame rate.
The licence footnote
Entity Culling uses a custom protective licence rather than a standard open one. In practice that means modpack authors need to read the terms rather than assume redistribution is fine, and it is a known point of friction for pack assembly.
It does not affect individual players at all. Install it, use it, no obligations.
Loader coverage
Fabric, NeoForge, Forge, Quilt and Babric are all listed on the project. The 26.3 builds are Fabric and NeoForge, with the Fabric build seeing roughly twenty times the downloads of the NeoForge one in the first day – which is a reasonable snapshot of where the 26.3 client population currently sits.
That skew is temporary and tracks whatever your preferred loader’s ecosystem has finished porting. The loader comparison covers the trade-offs if you are still deciding.
Worth installing?
Yes, if you play modded or on servers, and especially if your frame rate drops when you walk into a built-up area rather than when you look at terrain. That is the signature of entity load, and it is exactly what this addresses.
Less so if you play mostly vanilla in open terrain at moderate render distance, where there simply are not enough hidden entities for the path tracing to save anything. Our performance mod roundup covers what to install first if frames are the problem and you do not know why yet.
For the rest of the client stack, the 26.3 support tracker has the rest of the stack.
How to tell whether it is doing anything
The honest test is not the frame counter on an empty plain. Stand somewhere with a lot of entities hidden behind geometry – a village from outside its walls, a storage room full of item frames viewed from the next room, a busy spawn area – and toggle the mod.
If the number barely moves, entity rendering was not your bottleneck and no amount of culling will change that. If it jumps, that is the mod working exactly as designed, and the same scene will keep paying back every time you walk through it.
The debug screen’s entity counts are the other useful signal. A large gap between entities loaded and entities rendered means the path tracing is finding things to skip.
Settings worth knowing
The defaults are sensible and most people should leave them. Two are worth understanding anyway.
Tracing runs on its own thread, which is why it does not cost frame time to do the work. On a machine with very few cores that trade is less obviously good, and it is the one situation where the mod can underperform expectations.
There is also a distance beyond which entities are handled differently rather than traced individually, because tracing every entity at maximum render distance would cost more than it saves. If you run very high render distances and see entities behaving oddly at the far edge, that boundary is where to look first.
Images: Golden Days Base project gallery.