Advantages to using Sodium

Why use Sodium?

There are many advantages to using the official upstream version of Sodium instead of third-party forks (such as Xenon, Embeddium, etc.)

Sodium has significantly better performance.

Compared to other mods, Sodium continually receives new optimizations and improvements that help the game's performance in the places that matter.

Sodium has great support for the latest shader packs.

Shader mods (such as Iris Shaders) work out of the box with the latest version of Sodium on day one, and they provide the best performance and mod compatibility when used with Sodium.

Sodium has better mod compatibility.

Our developers work with mod authors and pack authors to make sure that Sodium behaves correctly in complex scenarios. Additionally, we work with the people who create platform APIs to ensure that our mod is compatible with what interfaces that mod authors are already using.

Sodium has better hardware compatibility.

Our large community helps to make sure that each release of Sodium works the best that it can across a large range of hardware. We validate that our changes do not cause regressions for users on older hardware, and make sure that as many people as possible can use the mod.

Sodium has better reliability.

There is an endless sea of third-party software and hardware drivers that can cause issues with Minecraft. Sodium automatically detects many of these problems and resolves them automatically, making it easier for mod pack authors to include the mod without worrying about some users not being able to play the game.

Sodium is easier for mod authors to support.

When writing mods for multiple mod loaders, it no longer becomes necessary to support code paths for different rendering mods, since the same code in your mod will work both on NeoForge and Fabric.

Sodium has a large and vibrant community.

There is an ever growing community which help to provide support to both users and mod authors. We also receive many contributions to the project from volunteers around the globe, just take a look at the project's revision history.

Sodium fairly rewards mod developers.

The developers of Sodium and other addon mods do not receive any revenue from third-party forks which combine these works, even though they often generate more revenue for themselves than the official upstream version.

Sodium enables a healthy ecosystem of mods.

Because third-party forks of Sodium are generally not compatible with addon mods, it is often the case that users are left downloading an out-of-date and unsupported version of all their other mods from a third-party source.

This makes installing mods much more difficult, and it causes a lot of effort to be unnecessarily spent on porting mods rather than actually improving the original version. Additionally, the authors of the original mod no longer receive any revenue for their work, which severely hurts the community that is creating these mods in the first place.