The major reason why Minecraft enjoys mainstream success today is because, since it came out in 2009, the first thing that was made possible by the developers at Mojang was for the game to be modifiable.

Most people that have heard about modifications may have, and rightly, the idea that it simply involves the painstaking task of drawing up texture graphics for block and models of objects of the ever-growing world of Minecraft.

And some casual players may be aware of mostly server-side modifications available that really are of a concern for server administrators that don’t run vanilla servers and run modifiable Minecraft server forks such as Bukkit, Spigot, PaperMC, and so forth.

But there happens to be a lot of client-side modifications that exist and in this post, I’ll be guiding you on how to add just two modifications that will literally replace your client with an optimized client and performance modification that will increase the number of options that will allow you to tweak the client to run as optimal as possible.

The two mods we’re going to go over is Minecraft Forge and Optifine

Reasons for using both Minecraft Forge and Optifine

There is no real necessity to use these mods, and your client can be running just fine on your system. But these mods exist for a good reason becasue, there are people who use old computer systems that can’t catch up with the system demands of current iterations of Minecraft.

The other reason that some people, such as myself, may want to use these two mods is simply because they want an insurence for consistency in performance and extension to the controls and options which in turn enhance the experience of playing Minecraft either solo or in a multiplayer server.

What is Minecraft Forge?

Minecraft Forge is what is known as an API or “Application Program Interface” which is just a fancy way of saying it’s tool that has made modifications that on the base game files so as to make it easy to run client-side or server-side modifications on your Minecraft client.

The reason for this is because there are mods that can run installed directly to the vanilla base files as-is. But there are times where some modifications cannot run properly or cannot run at all, causing for some instances where the Minecraft client will, in turn, cannot run properly causing for a performance hit.

An analogy that can be used to understand what this modification does is literally replaces the insides of it with new parts that in turn make the process of modifying the game client a breeze.

For further information and demonstration, here is a video. Get a drink ☕.

What is Optifine?

Optifine started out many years ago as a modification that changed the Minecraft client to be allowed to use high-resolution textures. The old name for this mod was “MCPatcher”.

“High resolution textures” is defined as any texture that is above x16 - that is to say more than 16px by 16px per side of a block, which can be expressed arithmetically as:

TR = Total Pixel Resolution

[16 x 16] * 6 == 1,536 pixels == TR.

Or

N = 32, 64, 128, or 256
xN = N^2 or N x N
TR = Total Pixel Resolution

Thus

xN == [N x N] * 6 == TR

Sizes that are considered “HD” are any texture pack (now referred to and are packaged as “Resource Packs”), are of the following sizes:

  • x32
  • x64
  • x128
  • x256

But since version 1.6.0, Minecraft has not needed a client mod for making this possible so this left with most people wondering what was the future for Optifine if its main pupose was no longer necessary? Well the answer was to further focus on client-side optimization. And what that means is that the client is going to focused on to be able to use the player’s computer RAM more efficiently and allow the client to be able to further.

This mod also offers tons of control options that allow for client-side customization such the image of backgrounds of menus when using pause menus (helpful for when playing multiplayer) there are also modifications for when you are able to reduce or remove certain graphical interface features that are otherwise not able to toggle on or off normally (like vignettes which, once removed, offer a slight performance boost).

Here’s a video demonstration that talks about Optifine. Get some popcorn.🍿

How to Install Minecraft Forge and Optifine Together.

There was a time when installing Optifine and Minecraft Forge, were an easy ordeal. There was nothing to it really: you just download and install each one in whatever order and they’d work side-by-side.

But there were developmental decisions that were taken that then made this impossible on behalf of the Minecraft Forge people and so now you have to install Optfine after Minecraft Forge. So a simple step-by-step instruction is going to be provided here.

Steps 1. - Install Minecraft Forge.

All you have to do, as you’ve probably seen in the video, is to go to the official Minecraft Forge website and install the latest version of Minecraft Forge.

Minecraft Forge Website link: https://files.minecraftforge.net/

Once you’ve downloaded the installation file, and assuming that you You have already ran an instance of the verison of Minecraft you’ve downloaded Minecraft Forge for, click “install client”, and then select “OK”

Forge Install Dialog

Once you have installed this, restart Minecraft and you should be able to see at the Title menu screen the option menu button labeled “mods”.

Here you will find a list of all the mods that are installed and also the option menu button for opening the mods folder for Minecraft Forge. In this folder is where you will put your copy of Optifine .jar mod file into later, so select it and leave it open for later. Close Minecraft.

Step 2. - Install Optifine.

You will have to go to the Optfine website (link) and you will go into the “Downloads” section and then select the link reading “Preview versions”.

Here, you will download a preview version of Optfine (as of the time of this publishing it’s Optifine 1.14.4 HD U F4 Pre11)

Once you have downloaded this file, copy it to the Minecraft Forge folder and restart Minecraft.

Once you have restarted Minecraft, start a game world for testing.

Once you’re in the generated game world, hit F3 and then you’ll see the following.

Image screenshot showing "Minecraft 1.14.4 (1.14.4-forge-28.2.23/forge)"

Screenshot image showing the Optifine Video Settings menu

And you’ll also see these options once you select the “Options…” button and then Video Settings

This is the Optifine menu and it is here that you’ll be able to tweak the game to whatever settings that you wish.

For further guidance on what option you could select to optimize your game and increase performance.

Mind you though, you don’t have to exactly follow it becasue it’s not going to be usually practical for a multiplayer server. So adjust according to what best works for you.

Finito

And that about does it! Hopefully this guide has helped you out in setting up your souped up Minecraft client, please make a backup of the files so you can have this setup on the ready if you should happen to need to reinstall the client.