What the hell is this?

Bit of a short post, but because I know everybody is chomping at the bit to get their hands on OptiFIne for 1.20.2. I say; don't.

Why not?

Put simply, the Sodium project has been long enough that other works have been developed around it. This doesn't just include shader capabilities, but also MCPatcher model and texture replacement, (selective) connected textures, better grass, emissives and all of that jazz.

How so?

The quickest and easiest way to make this happen is to just grab the Fabulously Optimized modpack from Modrinth. Afterward, you can make as many changes and additions to the modpack as you wish.

Changes?

Yes! Without going into too much detail, you can basically add whatever other Fabric-compatible mods you want and stuff should just work with this suite of mods. And uh… there's a lot of 'em. 47, in fact. So here's a list of every mod you can disable since you won't be needing 'em anyway as a wool-dyed keyboard-and-mouse PC gamer:

• Better Beds (lol why?)
• Borderless Mining (It's just fullscreen nonsense)
• Chat Reporting Helper (You're getting banned anyway)
• CIT Resewn (To later replace)
• Controlify (If you don't use controller)
• Fabrishot (who needs 4K screencaps?)
• Fadeless (Why do fades frustrate people?)
• e4mc (When was the last time you opened your world to LAN?)
• YetAnotherConfigLib (Dep: Controlify)
• Zoomify (Optional, keep if you like it.)

Here are some mods you should use in place of those, instead:

• CIT Resewn JSONLagPatch (Basically makes it better)
• Exordium (for GUI rendering)
• LazyDFU (Deferred DataFixerUpper calls to make the game load quicker)
  
• MidnightControls (But not what you think it's for)
• MidnightControlsExtra (Basicallty the cheaty stuff from LambdaControls, including block reacharound)
• MidnightLib (Dep: MidnightControls)
• Ok Boomer (But only if you removed Zoomify, works similar to OptiFIne zoom)
• owo-lib (Dep: Ok Boomer)
• Starlight (Faster light rendering, supplants Phosphor)

Everything else should be whatever you want and compatible with every other mod. Yes, I understand the irony of replacing two jar files (OptiFIne / OptiFabric) with over forty of them and it might not seem better, but it's not that bad, I promise. I've used it. Give it a shot.

Bonus tip

Invest some time in learning about Linux! I cannot recall all of the times I told Minecraft players curious about Linux to try it, and without even installing it to the hard disk noticed from USB 2.0 the system, and the game runs superbly, and better still once installed on a slower low-end machine. If you can dual-boot Linux, give it a shot!

EndeavourOS team recently updated their live image to their Galileo release, and with KDE Plasmashell being their default desktop environment now, they're basically Steam OS if it was a general Linux distribution — both use Arch Linux for their base, both use Plasmashell for desktop (though unlike Steam OS, you can choose what desktop environment to install if Plasmashell isn't your jam), both don't suck to use and it only goes up from there the more time you invest into it. Check it out today!