Sodium Relief is a lightweight, client-side companion for Sodium focused on one problem: reducing tooltip and hover stutter on inventory-like screens.
It targets GUI interactions where repeated per-frame work can feel uneven even when overall FPS is already fine — hovering across a chest, scanning an inventory, comparing items.
- Reuses already-prepared tooltip layouts while the hovered item is unchanged, instead of rebuilding them every frame.
- Stabilizes hover handling so the same target isn't recomputed redundantly as the cursor settles.
- Caches text width measurements for repeated strings (such as item stack counts drawn on every visible slot).
- Stays out of the way: when in doubt about an item or screen, it falls back to vanilla behavior.
Sodium Relief is intentionally narrow.
It is not a replacement for Sodium and not a general FPS mod. It will not raise your framerate in the open world — it smooths the feel of tooltip- and hover-heavy GUI usage. If you don't spend time in inventories, you won't notice it, and that's by design.
The effect is reduced redundant work, not extra frames — so it is measured as tooltip builds avoided rather than FPS. An automated in-game test opens a real inventory screen, hovers items, and counts the actual getTooltipFromItem builds (the expensive part) instead of rebuilding the tooltip every frame:
| Scenario | Tooltip draws | Real builds with Sodium Relief | Avoided |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resting on one item | 2,429 | 2 | 99.9% |
| Scanning 36 items (3 passes) | 3,714 | 38 | ~99% |
Each tooltip build was measured in-game at ~0.13 ms for common items (more for complex ones, ~0.26 ms), so the reuse above avoided roughly half a second of CPU work over the ~20-second test — work that would otherwise land as small per-frame hitches while you hover. (These counts are the real getTooltipFromItem builds; an earlier version of this table reported a higher number that was actually an internal fingerprint-rebuild counter, not the expensive build itself.)
Numbers are near-identical across Minecraft versions — verified in-game on 1.21.4, 1.21.10, 1.21.11 and 26.1.2. Reproduce them yourself with gradlew :sodium-relief-mc12110:runClientGameTest (the client gametest ships in every 1.21.4-and-newer module and the 26.x modules); each run writes a raw counter snapshot — including the measured build time — that you can inspect. A snapshot can be exported in-game at any time from the config screen's Export Benchmark button.
The exact inventory screen the test hovers — captured in-game by the test itself, not staged.
Several jars are built from the same shared core, each covering a Minecraft version range:
| Jar | Minecraft | Loader | Java |
|---|---|---|---|
sodiumrelief-mc1211-<ver>.jar |
1.21 – 1.21.1 | Fabric | 21 |
sodiumrelief-mc1213-<ver>.jar |
1.21.2 – 1.21.3 | Fabric | 21 |
sodiumrelief-mc1214-<ver>.jar |
1.21.4 | Fabric | 21 |
sodiumrelief-mc1215-<ver>.jar |
1.21.5 | Fabric | 21 |
sodiumrelief-mc1218-<ver>.jar |
1.21.6 – 1.21.8 | Fabric | 21 |
sodiumrelief-mc12110-<ver>.jar |
1.21.9 – 1.21.10 | Fabric | 21 |
sodiumrelief-mc12111-<ver>.jar |
1.21.11 | Fabric | 21 |
sodiumrelief-mc261x-<ver>.jar |
26.1.x | Fabric | 25 |
sodiumrelief-mc262x-<ver>.jar |
26.2 | Fabric | 25 |
Client-side only. Requires Fabric API. Sodium is recommended but not required. Mod Menu is optional.
Settings can be changed in-game, with no config file editing required:
- through Sodium's options page (1.21.11 only, when Sodium is installed),
- through Mod Menu, or
- through a button added to the vanilla Options screen.
Everything is on by default and safe to leave as-is. Available in English, Russian and Ukrainian.
Pick the jar matching your Minecraft version and drop it into your mods/ folder.
Sodium Relief is an unofficial, independent companion mod. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by CaffeineMC or the Sodium project, and it does not include or modify any Sodium code.
Sodium is the work of CaffeineMC. Sodium Relief is simply designed to work well alongside it. All product names, logos, and brands are property of their respective owners.