What is sodium?

Sodium is a mod for the game Minecraft that replaces the game's built-in graphics rendering code with a faster, more efficient version. When Minecraft runs, it draws the world on screen using a process that can be slow on many computers, causing the game to stutter or run at low frame rates. Sodium rewrites that process to get more out of the same hardware, so the game runs more smoothly without changing how it looks to the player. The mod is not made by Mojang (the company behind Minecraft) and cannot be installed like a regular program. It requires a mod loader, either Fabric or NeoForge, to be installed first. Those are separate tools that allow players to add community-made modifications to Minecraft. Once a loader is in place, Sodium is added as an additional file that the loader picks up when the game starts. To use Sodium, a graphics card needs to support OpenGL 4.5, a standard that most cards released in the past decade already meet. Devices that use software-based translation layers to fake OpenGL support are explicitly not supported, as those layers tend to be incomplete and cause problems that cannot be fixed in the mod itself. Support is provided through a Discord server run by the developer. Bug reports and requests for mod compatibility improvements go through the project's issue tracker on GitHub. The README notes that development focuses mainly on performance, compatibility, and catching up to features already present in Minecraft's original renderer rather than adding new visual effects. The mod is available as pre-built downloads from Modrinth and CurseForge, the two main platforms for distributing Minecraft mods. Developers who want to build it from source need Java 21 and the Gradle build tool. The code is licensed under Polyform Shield 1.0.0, which differs from open-source licenses in that it restricts use by competitors building similar products.