Minecraft Clients v. Real Mods:
A retrospective and PSA on popular Minecraft Clients (rewritten from the ground up)
This is a retrospective rant, serving as a PSA for users of clients (from a modder's POV) on why some clients are partly unoptimized and have glaring flaws.
The following contents are unfinished.
Anything written in this PSA is not final and may be subject to change.
There are topics included that are tailored to adults.
There are mentions of pedophilia below. Stop here if you don't like it.
- Minecraft Clients v. Real Mods:
- Here, again?
- Not Without Flaws
- An Analogy from the Mind: The Bookshelf
- Serious Problems
- There's Hope
- Not That Simple
- Hard to leave familiarity
- To Reiterate
- Exploring Clients
- Enough Yap; Why Is This Bad?
- Looking into alternatives
- My Personal Solution
- Post-PSA
Here, again?
This PSA is not intended to mock users for using clients, only to provide from a modder's perspective, why they are flawed.
Don't get your brain stems in a twist. Everything written here is personal opinion!
So, we're here again. The millionth attempt to rework this guide, because things never change and rants are very common this time of year. I got to get Minecraft almost five years ago, and w've also speeded past the two year anniversation of this writeup! The oldest known archive of this existing is March 5th 2023. I can't even remember what life was like back then!
Okay, putting aside my biases, this will be a long one to write. I have to re-write one of my oldest public rants ever, because the images are all dead after Discord reworked their API, and a lot of stuff in my life changed. Stuff like the people I know being changed around, a lot of old faces fading from my life, many accidents and many people getting sick of my shit... We're all aging like people, and maturity is natural.
And well, nothing changed.
But why am I talking about maturity? Because clients are still crazy popular while we're making advancements in the Modding space. I've changed a lot in two and a half years, but some things don't change. Like the player counts of these clients, and their general feature list, which get higher and higher. I do appreciate that these projects can get followings, because really, I get it. Convenience and familiarity is easy. Nobody wants to debug crashes. But, as somebody who now mods their own fixes and cool stuff in, I think Clients just aren't doing it for me.
Let's talk about how we got here: in late 2020, I was gifted a copy of Minecraft: Java Edition by a friend who was growing inactive, but wanted to drag me into a couple of games. I had pirated the games for over 6 years over the one fact that I lived in a broke family and couldn't afford the game myself. I know that doesn't make anybody feel good and I know it's mostly unnecessary, but the thing is, I was not going to get no copy of Minecraft overnight. Usually, the most we could afford is gift cards is the cheapest version (usually 10-20 bucks), which makes it really hard to buy a game nearly thirty dollars. Of course, I owned the PS3 edition in 2018, but as a kid, I really wanted to play Mineplex and Hypixel.
At least I got my game. Unfortunately, Mineplex was dying and was a few years off from combusting and dying out. Hypixel was definitely thriving, but I was a little too late to the fun. But oh well. I got to play Hypixel for a while with a friend, got to play Bedwars with my friend group and everything was fine. At least, until I realized that OptiFine was not enough. It was cool, and convenient, yeah, but it was lame, and it ran a little weird. I wanted a bit more, and remembered I liked mods. At the time, unfortunately, MultiMC (before PolyMC was a thing, iirc, but that's a whole new post) had no support for Microsoft accounts. So, rather than use the standard launcher provided by Mojang (which was always shit to manage mods with), I decided to pick up Badlion Client, on my friend's account (before we swapped accounts and I got a completely fresh one).
Oh boy, the disappointment. It was cool, but it was not doing it. It was bloated and I found myself spending more time configuring than I was satisfied with my setup. And that lead us to, well... mods. I went the modding route after finding clients limited. That's a nice TL;DR, but we already found that out two years ago. Clients clearly didn't change last year, so what's different this year?
Well, I have experience, first of all. Some time on my back, better ways to rephrase everything, and the ability to write and imagine more. I'm a writer and have written a lot of fictional stuff over the past 4 years, and even been blogging the past 2. So, with some new experience, let's imagine this: you're a random person like me, tried a few clients, didn't buy any cosmetics and disappointed. What now?
Most people would probably think nothing of it, being the poor souls they are. Maybe they'll stick with it because they don't see many options and the luxury that they've been given? Probably too fancy to give up. Or maybe they actually like these clients! Maybe to them, clients aren't placebo, but perfectly fitting of their needs! Maybe they don't need to squeeze out efficiency and they find their current setup more than enough. Good for them!
Some might be a little disappointed, but move on. They probably wouldn't do much of it either, just dealing with what they're stuck with. This could be in the form of the weekend warrior just sighing and moving on. Because he doesn't have time to look into anything else. Or maybe it's the ranter, who complains to their friends like the usual, and maybe everybody can talk about something based on something one of their friends rant about... Hey, that's starting to sound familiar.
Okay, well I was one of these people, compiling a pastebin full of why clients suck, bla bla. Okay, that didn't help much, as expected. So where do we go now? Well, we can educate people! Think of this as like a Twitlonger rant. It's rant and it's long, yeah, but it's educational and fighting for what I believe in. After all, we don't need negativity to plague our lives. That wouldn't help!
And at least we don't have a pay-to-use PvP client, as they call these things. Another boiii
would be too much...
Not Without Flaws
Let's get to the meat of things! Minecraft is a great game, sure. It's a lot of my childhood and the childhoods of many of the people I knew, it did that. It drew us all in and we loved the idea of being able to do silly things, and I'm sure there's people out there who liked the idea of adding a toilet to Minecraft, as unrealistic as it sounded. But it was possible, there was a modding community and it was strong! But things are changing now.
Minecraft is not a perfect game. Many exploits for the game, as much as I can hold myself back... They're free and easy to use. There might be skill ceilings for those trying to hide the fact they're hacking, but the entry level is lower than any other game I've ever seen. At least on Java. Not to mention the constant fall of creators and the very abnormal stories coming from many dark places of the community. And don't get me started on how much you can divide the community by adding Dream SMP into an argument... It's hard to find a great survival server to play on now. It's just a mess.
Not to mention some people out there have different needs than I do. I found mods easy to install, but the same can't be said for the many of people who might have heard of mods but don't know how to install them. Or maybe they're just tech illiterate and need somebody even slightly good behind their back to teach them the basics. Of course, the skeptical people exists and the "I'm not interested" crowd...
The point is we're divided. And clients came to fill that hole. But the thing is, it's not a perfect one fits all, and depending on what you need, it's actually worse.
It's just a letdown that we got here. Everybody's on different pages and we now live in a world where we can't strip useless code and interchange things on a fucking Minecraft client of all things. It's like an Operating System. And we're just supposed to be happy?
Okay, sure. We can go on and on, how I have a skill issue and a hate boner, that Badlion is bad, that the Brave Lion is bad, or that both are great... And all that. But maybe an analogy or two might help make it clear where I'm coming from.
An Analogy from the Mind: The Bookshelf
Here's an analogy that might help.
Minecraft is a bookshelf. You bought the bookshelf, right? You could have it there for show... and use the bookshelf for what it is. If you were really that kind of person. Other people might like their bookshelf with almost nothing on it. That's okay! We call that a Vanilla bookshelf. What most people like to do is add books. Maybe one book is a strategy guide for life, maybe one book is magical and it helps you see in the dark.
Some people like having a lot of books. They might go out of their way to buy "book packs", which gives them a load of books to add on their bookshelf. This might make their reading experience more challenging, or maybe it might make their reading experience much easier. That's okay! Some people like this, and we call it having a modded bookshelf.
Sometimes, things might not work out, and adding books might make you need to maintain your bookshelf. There will be days you add a book, the bookshelf will break, and you'll need to repair it. That's okay! You look at what happened, see a shelf failed, put some glue to sturdy it up and it's brand new. Bookshelves breaking when you add books is another story, we'll save that for another time.
Everybody's enjoying their bookshelf and there's nothing wrong with that.
There are even two main bookshelf brands that everybody appeals to. Of course, the standard bookshelf you got with Minecraft is Mojang branded (which is mostly what OptiFine and Clients tailor to). It's how they intended you to read, no problem. You add books to a Mojang bookshelves, you're adding resource packs and OptiFine. Maybe some malicious stuff too! But there's two brands that many people will turn to when they want more: Fabric and Forge. Forge is great for older bookshelves, but for newer bookshelves, you'll want to turn to Fabric, because it loads faster and is more optimized. At least, I think so.
Of course, we need to fit OptiFine here. You might think that OptiFine is a book you put on your shelf, and that's not wrong! OptiFine has a mode where you put it on your Forge bookshelf, and no problem. That sounds like it leaves out Fabric bookshelf owners, but a special dude made a book that you put next to OptiFine, and OptiFine suddenly fits on your bookshelf!
But if you have a Mojang bookshelf... Well, you can kind of fit it in as a book. But it's also more like paint, because really, your bookshelf is still empty. Put some OptiFine paint on your bookshelf, and now it looks nice and repainted! But it's still an unmodded Mojang bookshelf. You still need to add your books, like your texture packs. I think it's more accurate to think of OptiFine like a fine paint, because it doesn't really change anything. Just makes it look nicer, and makes it perform about a couple of frames high.
Okay, well how is it paint? I didn't exactly answer that, so let's look deeper. You might have a rotten, half broken bookshelf that works, but is a pain in the ass to use. OptiFine is a coat of paint you put over it. You might be repainting the shelf, and it might seem fine, but it's still a broken bookshelf. It only makes the bookshelf look less broken. It's not placebo, obviously, but the bookshelf is still a little bit off. Like it's not the perfect shape it could be.
And that leaves clients. They're kind of like dropshippers or resellers. You're buying a Mojang bookshelf, you're not getting the fancy Fabric or Forge brand that lets you add special books, right? They say you can, but it doesn't work, they added it to their bookshelf but didn't allow you to add any books. You buy it, you try it out... and there's almost no space to add anything.
You have a corner to add your texture packs, but there's a bunch of bolted down books taking up the space for all the fun stuff. Just enough to add a resource pack, and some shaders. You can paint the bookshelf with their OptiFine, and you can put some texture packs over everything, but you can't remove what you don't want. You can press a button on these books and hide them, yeah, but they're still wasting that precious bookshelf space. There's no room for anything.
Don't you want control over your bookshelf?
Serious Problems
Do you see the problem yet?
Clients appear nice at first, but they really just limit what you can do. There's no space to put a mod, instead they put a bunch of other random, gimmick shit and go "Ahhh, can't put the modloader on! No toilets for you!", or whatever you want. Guns, new food, nitrogen, grillers, chairs, even origins or new mobs? You can't put that in the bookshelf, they blocked the room. And that's where the issue is.
Not to mention the optimization problems. They might give you OptiFine at most, add their names to the menus over everything, and call it a day. This is fine in the case of like, specifically 1.8 where trying to further optimize over 1.8 is basically null, but in the cases like 1.12, 1.16, and hell even the modern DAY, they don't add much. Not to mention when it comes to 1.19, you don't get No Chat Reports. So if you are on a public server on 1.19.2, and there's that one malicious asshole with Gaslight installed, you're SOL. Shit Outta Luck. Best be begging with one leg cut off!
This just... sucks. You have to always look at a bunch of settings you might not want, and you can't remove them AT ALL. You can't replace it with what you want, they choose everything for you and the best you can do is turn it off. Well I don't want to just check it off, I want to stop fucking looking at it! God damn!
There's Hope
Okay, well we've been targetting Lunar and Badlion here mostly. But you're all forgetting things. Like the existance of good clients!
AxolotlClient for example. Sure, on the surface, it just seems like a lazy recreation of Lunar with ugly menus, a little off... But that's really all you need. Not to mention, note how it's based on Fabric, a known modloader. So you could install those mods you want right next to it! That's what we're really forgetting.
Another example too, SkyClient. Note first off that it lists issues with other clients you're used to! It's braggy, yes, but the thing is, SkyClient is different. They're based on the modloader Forge, and it's made specifically for Hypixel. A use that you probably mainly have Lunar for. Isn't that nice, now?
Oh, you don't feel like trying those, because they use mod stuff you don't know how to use. Try LabyMod, it might be what you want! I know they say Forge, but you can just as easily install it like you would use the Minecraft Launcher and have your fun, just like you want to.
It's like the Bookshelf Analogy. You have all these flavors of paint, and you can install a pack of books to get started... And then you have room to go buy more books if you want them! Like showing what you're playing on Spotify while you're reading, or even randomizing what items you get. You finally have that power again! And if you're not happy, you have the option to add anything you want, because you have a Forge brand bookshelf. And all of the books and magazines you want to add to your bookshelf fits right in, nice and new, no problems at all. We could be having so much better...
Not That Simple
Alas, not.
We've become used to Clients as a luxury. It is now easy for one to say "No thanks, I'll stick with what I have", while willingly being fucked over. Familiarity always beats new territory, and placebo always has influence over facts. If somebody has a bad experience, that's going in their mind forever and not leaving.
This is the cycle of companies. You probably know this cycle very well, considering Spotify likes to take basics away from mobile users, their piracy guides, ad blockers... And we all keep paying them for it. Netflix did this too, they stopped password sharing and instead of people flocking to piracy like a lot of us wished we would, Netflix just made more money. And while you pay that, you don't get the shows you want. This is what it's like to have a modern service in the modern day. This is just what you get, and people are happy with it. You can't teach an old dog new tricks, that's what it is.
Even if you try to change things, it doesn't matter. Some people may be stubborn, but others just need a little push.
Let's say you used to watch videos about mods that added new types of pigs. You wanna do it too, and you have Lunar! Okay, you have the mod, but how do you add it? You searched up guides and... you can't figure it out.
Well I'm here to tell you the answer! You want to install that cool mod about pigs, right?
Well that's the that's the neat part: You don't. You just can't.
You can add resource packs. If you're lucky, switch the main menu styles, change a few visuals... That's it. You're lucky if you can even remove their logo, or get a suggestion added from a mod. People officially call these PvP Clients as they had heavy use in Hypixel Duels and other PvP gamemodes, but I used to have the habit of calling them "Strictpacks", based on how much they bolt down what you can do. Use either as you wish, but just remember calling it something other than PvP Client will make you look dumb.
This is the world we live in.
Hard to leave familiarity
Okay, yeah, that sounds dark as fuck. I know I gloomed and doomed back there, but you just have to remember that everybody has their reasons for not picking up mods. Let's drop the bookshelf analogy and talk real.
There's many reasons why somebody might not touch Forge:
- It sucks
- Fun fact, using Minecraft Launcher with mods, is a pain in the ass!
- Other launchers might overwhelm people or leave them with a bad taste in their mouth
- It's hard
- Some people might struggle to use mods without other people's help or without very easy to understand instructions
- It's just too much to remember
- People can have short memory! Maybe they don't like having all that junk on their screen.
- Of course, Lunar is just as bad, but that's an eyesight thing. Mods might be forcing somebody to remember too many edge cases.
- There's not enough time to try
- People live on busy schedules!
- There's not enough energy to try
- Emotional problem, life situations, hell even being tired all the time might be a few reasons why somebody might not try these.
- What already works is fine, and trying anything else is not an option right now
Of course, that won't stop elitists from saying it's all an excuse. But in my case, I'm not trying to make excuses for why people should stay away from mods, that's far from my point. I'm just saying that everybody has a reason why picking up a mod or two isn't just "easy". Things are complicated.
To Reiterate
Alright, something probably went over a few people's heads, so let me explain it again like you're five:
These "clients" aren't custom enough to fit everyone. Everybody's "#1 client" looks different. Somebody might want to add new pigs. Maybe all somebody wants is to look at their family photos while playing. But for everybody else, don't you want to play the game the way you want?
I mean, in the early 2000s, people were downloading something called WindowsBlinds and making the computer look how they want! And it was awesome! Why can't we have the same thing with Minecraft? Why can't we add what we want? Why can't we add our own accessibility and assistive mods, and be forced to work with this garbage? What if we had a mod to let colorblind people play and no other client has it? What then?
Why can't we have it this way?
Big brother.
Seriously, developers can't do nothing about it, it's just how these clients are designed! I don't know if they want things to be like this or something, but it's working. It hurts. They say you can have it your way, then proceed to force all these features in your face. You can't remove it, it's always going to be bloated in their client. You can't even have fun with your own stuff.
And then they go around telling people it's the "only client you'll ever need". Like seriously, what the fuck?
And it works. Because some people are very new to tech and don't know how to use it at all. Because it works for them. Better than anything else. And that's it. And they get lots of controversy. And we just... keep using these clients. Like sheep.
I do get in some cases, it's like you're ordering the entire store at a restaurant, but that's not the point. I don't want to own the store, I want to own my burger. Let me add more ketchup and remove tomato, god damnit. Don't force pickles on my fucking burger, let me pick!
Exploring Clients
There may be misinformation, or misattributed / undocumented claims.
Unfortunately, some allegations regarding Badlion seem very vaguely explained, and I didn't have an exposing document to back up any claims. Take anything you read with a grain of salt. If you're hesitant to believe it, denial is always a living style.
This section has satire and sarcastic comedy.
Hi, future Client developers that are reading, and fellow players! Most of what you read is very sarcastic, I know that a lot of what you put on sale is just to centivise people to support their favorite work. I am well aware of that, I blew everything out of proportion for comedy and to make my point clearer that these things are not a thing in my culture, please do not assasinate me.
Okay, I hear you. You want examples. You need to see this for yourself.
Here's what we're going to do; let's go through a few popular clients together. The finest, ripest popular examples, and maybe if we got time, we'll look at a few niches. As a modder, I'm going to mention a lot of mods I'm accustomed to, and use these clients as though they were my mods. I'll explain why something's bad, why something's lacking, and just explain why I think it's harder than
Let's go through a few clients together. We'll go through some popular examples, and we'll go through some niches.
Then, we'll find out if they hold up against a DIY Modder's needs.
Let's start with the fan favorite, the underdog.
Lunar Client (moderate language)
Section not finished.
Images and write-ups about the client experience need to be added.
Lunar is nothing short but a huge mess. If you paid attention to the SkyClient shit, you'd know that their main motivation is said to literally just be about the cash. They lie about their benchmarks like everybody else to drive people to their platform, and it's definitely working, since like Spotify, people have flocked to it and refuse to leave it. Yeah, welcome to monopolies.
Let's dig you out of the grave, old friend.
The Front Page: Lunar+
Before we dive into the client itself, let's see what you would see on the homepage: Lunar Plus. Did you know you can put 10 bucks a month into this useless garbage? That's right, you can actually pay them for their 'hard' work. Let's look at the perks. Might be worth something.
Here's some translations for people who don't understand the fancy language:
- You can turn your "I am a Lunar Client user and simping for it" badge from a boring white to a girly pink, with a nice little touch of green! We think this is super important, because it's the first thing you see!
- Get a 10% discount on my overpriced and pointless cosmetics! Please buy the ability to shake your ass in front of a toddler, Discord stole my idea with Avatar Decorations and I'm late on my fifth mortgage.
- Does not include a discount on your hospital bills if you're assaulted for harassment.
- Get access to a text channel in our discord!
- ...You use Discord, right? Please don't start an argument in our server.
- Pay for something you can get for free with the Wavy Capes mod!
- Yes, we want you to pay for mod functionality. We have very low income right now, and we want to manipulate you into thinking only we can do this!
- Get cosmetics every month that will disappear!
- Oh, when? Sorry, we aren't telling you on the front page. Either when at the end of the month or at the end of your subscription.
- Also, we might make you just buy it with that 10% discount from earlier!
either disappear when you unsubscribe, at the end of the month, and/or need to be purchased separately!
- Paying to default dance! Socialism can kiss my ass!
- Sorry, Fortnite did it for free? Fuck them 'Forters.
- Get an emote every month you might just lose when you unsubscribe!
- And you might only be able to have one at a time!
- Have as many friends as you want! No more big brother saying you can't have more than 100 friends!
Oh, that's the end of the perks.
Well, that left more questions than it answered. Mainly, do they take it all back when you unsubscribe? The fact they weren't transparent, let alone with any small print, is fucking insane! How do you run a subscription service and just not post the terms of what happens at the end! That's like if YouTube Premium came out and you had to buy it to use it, but they fail to tell you that if you unsubscribe, you'll lose it forever! What the fuck? Was it hard to even put small text on the page that leaves a disclaimer like "Hey, this feature will be missing when you unsubscribe"? Oh, I'm supposed to guess what happens when I unsubscribe, and you're going to lash out at me and call it "common sense"? Well, I'm sorry that you didn't make it clear what happens when I decide YOU'RE NOT DOING A GOOD JOB OF TELLING ME WHAT YOUR TERMS ARE.
Well that was very worth my hard earned money! Especially when you have to basically assume what happens when you unsubscribe! Maybe if things were more TRANSPARENT, I would know. I have to basically assume in between what happens when you do, as you can tell. You can afford to buy out Badlion Client in March 2025, but you can't afford to tell me after 2 years in small text what happens when I unsubscribe?
What's next, we have to pay to play singleplayer? We lock modloaders behind a paywall? And supposedly this crap is the #1 Minecraft Client.
I know that this shit gets somewhere between 200k and 500k in peak hours and that Googles is on their side too because they're first on the search list for "Minecraft Client", but this is ridiculous. Plus, if they're focused on performance, why did we use Phosphor? It only does the bare minimum for the Lighting Engine. Yet we're using Sodium instead of OptiFine, and that's casually chilling on the launch menu. Can we not afford Starlight?
Also, ReplayMod being a separate module? I can't tell if that's comedy design, or if they had genuine compatibility issues. I hope it's compatibility. It would be a stupid idea to separate them. Just disable the mod? Jesus christ, it would of been nicer to know what everything does. It's not like we can fork out the Replay Mod code anyway. if you're gonna bake everything in, might as well do it right.
Oh, not to mention, they deprecate old version support. How about you take the route that hacked clients do and include ViaVersion, at the least? Please?
Skidding and mangling everything
Because fuck basic consumers... right?
God... Who knows if they got permission for skidding CaffieneMC's additions and everything. Feather already got into beef a long time ago for trying to skid Patcher, and who knows if Caff even allowed this. Whether it's a person or a group, I don't remember. I'm getting an anerysum from all of these weird decisions.
Like, come on! You added ReplayMod and Sodium, made Wavy Capes a pay-to-use, used Phosphor instead of Starlight, was it license limitations? Oh, you only skid code open to the public domain? Good lord... ModernFix, Palladum, FoamFix, those are all some solid examples. The 3D Skin Layers developer is already pissed because you violated his license, you refused to use the Modrinth API because what, Curseforge is more popular? You went ahead and ghosted him, made a clone of HUD Caching from Patcher... God, so many features, and you have it all scattered apart or using the most inefficient variant possible.
Sure, let's rip mods from the hard working to make a bunch of money upstream. Sure, no problem with that. Then let's steal from everybody and make the ideal reincarnation of Feather Launcher, let's make everything a complicated hell and undermine the modding community! What a great fucking idea! Let's all high five each other like kids and go ruin the consumer's experienc, like they're hooked on us like a medicine! Not to mention, they force you in their Discord if you want comsetics. That's cool for people who never had any before, but that seems a lot like trying to inflate your Discord server member count, don't you think? That might be a little excessive. Didn't know you were tired of your Underdog title.
At least in 1.20, you won't have to worry about Starlight anymore, but still, big applause for outdoing Yandere Dev... Now that's a name I was hoping to never say again.
Per-force-ments guides
Ah, they did more than humiliate themselves. That was not enough, so they released a performance guide to try and "help" people in need harder. God, at this point, just say that using Lunar Client will solve world hunger. What's next, that using Bathtub Client will end racism?
Having low FPS (frames per second) while playing Minecraft is an extremely common problem that many Minecraft players complain about. Luckily, this is a very easy issue to fix.
Easy issue? I hope it does.
Let's take a nice long look at what they wrote. Of course, the first thing they do is tell you to use their client. Because every company's site is another clone of selfpromo.forum with their own mini GPT writing their posts for them. Really, the last thing that needed to happen was that they wrote the article with ChatGPT like every other modern AI Slop article publisher, and the world's already over. Complete narcissism. Yeah sure, let's use your overbloated client to solve the bloat in another client.
Next, they tell you to allocate more RAM... Which is pretty common advice for anybody who's modding, but not really for a Vanilla player. 4 GB is enough for any modern player, but for budget players, that's their entire RAM count, and Lunar wants you to allocate a fourth (1/4) of your RAM if you have under 8 GB. And for 4 GB of RAM, that's... 1GB. That's enough for 1.8, sure, but for somebody looking to play the latest version, that sounds like a quick way to get an "Out of Memory" crash. I know that it's the user fault for trying to play Minecraft on a 4 GB device, and that you'd have a 5x better experience modding every optimization in hell out of a device in hopes it works, but news flash, low spec users also sometimes can be the most tech illiterate, so it makes sense.
Luckily, they include a nice graph. The numbers are solid, and they know what they're doing there.. Mostly. The fact they cap 9 GB+ to 4 GB is at least nice, they know the basics. Unforuntately, for users with 2 GB of ram, you have to allocate 500MB. Which was only acceptable for Minecraft in 2010. Lol.
Not to mention anybody with overkilling gaming setups. Let's say 1/4th of your RAM is 6 GB. That's excessive for a normal person, but might be normal for another. Well now, you unnecessarily allocated 6 Gigabytes and your entire computer is slowing down. Let's give a round of an Applause for Lunar, for guide of the year, they explained in the most BASIC way possible how much RAM you should assign if you have at least 12 Gigabytes of RAM!
Okay, enough assholing aside. I blew that way up, really, you should allocate 2-4 GB if you can afford it. If you're on 1.8 and below, more like 1-2. That's more than enough.
Looking more at the guide, they include instructions for OptiFine and Sodium video settings, but unfortunately, they copied the same thing for both. Sodium has many powerful settings the user could mess with, like Chunk Threads, but instead you copy paste it like a GPT article. A curious user might poke around and disable a lot of Sodium settings they think they don't need, and might make the performance WORSE. Or maybe, they'll think Sodium is too nerdy and go back to OptiFine. Then haleujah, bad performance. Plus, their "All Modules" section is Lunar only settings.
Unfortunately, the rest of their guide is junk. They ask you to lower your "polling rate", which will alienate and confuse people. The average user will not need to change that unless if they're on 1.8, because 1.8 has no Raw Mouse Input, which to fix the mouse, you lower the polling rate to 125. But if a user is told to do so, they'll set it to 125 and find they both do not run any better, and their mouse feels wrong.
Other than that, failing to specify that Shaders also impact performance and telling people to "disable mods" and only listing three examples of performance heavy mods (which might make hoarders and shaderists go nuts), they actually give solid advice. They tell you that on gaming laptops you need to use your Dedicated GPU (with a link to another Lunar guide... which is lame, but also does the job), to update your graphics drivers, and that you can go bother support if it's still confusing or slow. I made fun of the guide a bit much, but the instructions are kind of bad and could be written a bit better. It comes off being written by AI and it's kind of grating.
Not to mention a few things could have been mentioned, aren't. Like Sodium's CPU Render-Ahead limit and chunk rendering thread counts, deferring chunk updates, changing your JRE arguments, adding mods to fix the performance... Oh right, you can't add mods! Haha, good joke, Dj.
But realy, they at least did the bare minimum for a guide. If you have any doubts, feel free to compare my notes to the guide yourself. The link for the guide is also in my sources.
Oh, they released a second one, guess they wanted to fire up GPT again. Let's go over and look at those. Let's read through it just us...
How to boost fps on modern Minecraft using Lunar Client | Lunar Client
Let's talk about the title formatting first... Why is FPS not in all caps? You have the header font in all caps, why not capitalize FPS in all caps? You put Lunar Client twice? Does it not look nice? Does it not give you creditability? DOES IT NOT- and they immediately stroking their own ego by putting "Use Lunar Client" at the top. I would literally rather play Minecraft as though I trusted no mods and clients at all. Thanks a lot.
Yeah, so mainly this guide is about their new feature, Turbo Entities. As per usual, they provide no information on what it is and what it does, they just make puppy eyes at you and go "Look, it might make you go faster! It'll fix your game, I swear! Turn it on and see what happens-" well first off, some of us prefer to not use this shitty slop you're putting on our plates. You haven't realy told us the technical details?
And right after, they go right to Sodium. This is a no brainer for power users, but they forgot that this list of fixes only includes Sodium, Indium+Iris, and Lithium. Note how the big monsters of performance adjustments aren't here. They guide you through their likely rigged benchmarks (which is also rigged on their front page, by the way! all clients love to do this), and more yap. The only thing in Lunar's benefit is that they don't tell the user they probably already use Sodium over Lunar compared to the Vanilla one having no mods. Cool, you undermined Sodium's performance benefit. Give yourself a pat on the back.
It's easy to say you're just trying because you're a small company, and that you're innocent, but really, the Client space is mostly about ripping each other off. EVERYBODY already has a Keystrokes mod, everybody's stealing from eachother, defaming each other, accusing each other of being horrible people, and trying to create a circle jerk of edgy TikTok users with toddler level brain performance. This is just how monopolies work, unfortunately, Google does similar shit. Not to say it's the same thing.
It's just really hard to play innocence when you use the same key to open your mod menu that all the hacks use.
Even Patches Say You're Lame (brief adult themes mention)
Before we read some old, outdated patch notes, let's talk about the acquisition. On March 12th 2025, Lunar Client had bought Badlion and made it possible to play Badlion from Lunar's laucher. This is so dumb, because Badlion has so much beef with it's users for having two KNOWN PEDOPHILES as previous owners. Why in your right would you buy-
Ahem, sorry. Blunt trauma. Anyway.
So, they bought Badlion. It seems they have plans to merge them together at some point, because after this point, they begun to add some Badlion features, seemingly including their cosmetics locker (which I'm not sure if it was a Badlion thing or not), and their Motion Blur. Ironically, adding their motion blur voided all reason for me to personally use Badlion... If I was not already a modder and uses PolyBlur for this.
Unfortunately, I'm very out of touch with Lunar and most of the new stuff will be when we put the gloves on. So for now, let's look at some old Patch Notes I have from 2023. Let's re-read those, read a 2024 patch note I found (which is the newest one on their blog it seems), I'll tell you what's up, then let's dig into the meat: the patch notes.
Starting with Patch Notes #24, the last public patch notes I found on Lunar's blog, from Janurary 2024. They added Shulker Previews, which... Sorry, Ivy?
Well, as it turns out, there's been many mods that already give shulker previews. I guess that Lunar wanted to get in on the praise, maybe just wanted further excuses to hook people on their ecosystem, or the more likely and popularity based answer, xisumavoid used it on Hermitcraft. Apart from that, they finally add FerriteCore and further seal the gap between Lunar and modding. Which is bad. They also add Noxesium, but only for 1.20.2, even though FerriteCore wasn't added to 1.20.1, because, I don't know... Fuck it, version racism.
Apart from that, they also added "modpack support", which is probably either super jank or barely working. Who wants to play modpacks on a Client that steals every optimization that modders already adore? What's next, Async gets added? Good fucking lord... They also add URIs, which I know a lot from my experience with dealing with ROBLOX Revivals, most notably Novetus, which is a very popular choice. They call it "deeplinks", which I guess... isn't wrong? They claimed to have added Fabric mod support to lunar too, but as far as I could tell, it didn't work, but we'll try it again this year.
Going backwards, Patch Notes #22 adds banner advertisements to the client, specifically for advertising sales. They also added fog customization, raindow borders (lol?), patch fixes for mod GUIs, and partner server fixes (ew). They also kindly updated Iris, and not much else.
That's not where the meat is though. Looking at Patch Notes #21, they added Sodium and Iris, two classic CaffieneMC mods that basically ruins the entire fun part that made Clients so unoptimized: lack of optimization. As far as I can tell, they have contiued that legacy.
In #21, they also add Phosphor (no Starlight?), a playtime counter (flex to everybody how bitchless you are!), a port of WAILA and a note that mod developers that want to be on Lunar (lol) should contact them. They also kindly added a polling rate warning, which won't matter to most. They steal more mods, update OptiFine, etc. #20 is mostly the same, they just add AppleSkin and GeckoLib. They don't do anything about chat reports, it seems. Unfortunate.
Gloves On
(launcher notes)
Oh, but we didn't even take a look inside this dumb fuck. Well, time to lift the hood.
After all, I can enjoy the game without having it use more than 50% of my memory, right? ...right?
(double check if game still overuses memory)
(game notes)
Sources
- In case you didn't believe the Lunar Plus perks, here's the upsell page.
- Here's a medium.com post documenting the bullshit with 3D Skin Layers.
- The original Lunar's FPS Boosting ""guide"". Compare your notes to mine as you do.
- A second guide they made, for some reason.
- The acquisition post they made when they bought Badlion.
- Patch 20, documenting AppleSkin's features being added to their Saturation addon.
- Patch 21, documenting the addition of CaffineMC mods, and "Modloader Support".
- Patch 22, documenting their "quality of life". It's just random shit.
- Patch 24, documenting the addition of FerriteCore and Noxesium, as well as the additiion of shulker previews, "modpack support" and URIs.
- "How to edit your own mods" - Lunar Client 2024. The biggest joke ever made.
Badlion Client (adult themes & strong language)
(introduction)
Australian-American Alabama Love
(controversy)
Pride Against The Night
(you don't need an anti-cheat bro)
Double Accounts, Double the Passwords
(whyyy)
Frontpage
(read the perks)
A Deep Dive
(play this shit)
Sources
- This entry in recordedpixel's Podcast, formatted into text by acast.com, documents some of the controversy about Badlion. I cannot 100% confirm their truth though, so you'll have to take my word for it until I find further evidence.
- This store page that highlights some key features of BAC.
- A support page documenting the new Premium and Premium Plus ranks. I used this as a base for the perks sub-rant.
- Their actual premium perks page. In case the article seemed ridiculous.
Feather Client (moderate language)
(introduction)
Literal Stolen Junk (Controversial From The Start)
(controversies)
People Use It Anyway
(feather being well known)
Frontpage
(literally view the page)
A look inside
As a "Mod"
(load it as a mod and review it as a modder)
As a "Client"
(use the launcher and review it as a player)
Sources
- A Hypixel forum post about the unusual choices they've made, and some of their rough actions.
- A Twitter post from Sk1er highlighting the code stealing
- This screenshot of a Skytils feature that blocks unsupported clients, Feather included
- u/Pernova12 posted on this reddit thread and that inspired me to bring up that even Feather users think that feather's shit doesn't work properly.
Enough Yap; Why Is This Bad?
(it's bad because it eases everybody down)
Looking into alternatives
(some good ass alternatives)
What if...
(i got a good ass job)
My Personal Solution
(talk about mods having an impact on me)
Post-PSA
Credits
Research:
- IvyNeo
- Help with Lunar Client Patch Notes research, mod research for Lunar Patch Notes 24
- Original "Fabric, Quilt and Forge" meme from 2023 (not added)
- Many anonymous users of Clients I've reviewed
- Information on how the clients work & some words about the average experience, which was of help
Updates
July 9th 2025:
- Rewrote more of the early stuff
- Bumped down all the headers (now that "New Rant" and "Old Rant" are gone
- Extra clarifications to the "Bookshelf" analogy (It didn't address a few things I had in mind)
- Removed the very crude and unnecessary "Toilet Paper" analogy because I feel it doesn't align with my visions anymore
- New "Hard to leave familiarity" section on the intro
July 8th 2025:
I really want to get updating this, holy shit.
- Some more formatting work. I wrote some of the intro, I wasn't very happy with it.
- Spelling fixes
- Prepared outline for Feather Client
- I added some more warnings
June 29th 2025:
- I got in contact with the original creator of the Lunar vs Modloaders meme. I've removed their credit line as they do not like their original Reddit username anymore. I'm not sure if I also want to replace the meme, it is 2 years old, but it did make a huge impact on this post...
May 18th 2025:
- new domain
- set the foundation for structure
December 3rd 2024:
- Some more work on Lunar Client
- Still STILL not done, man
December 2nd 2024:
- A little bit of work was done here
- Still not done (yet)
- Maybe we'll get to clients soon
The old rant has been removed from this post.