# Star
This is **Star**. It's designed to not intrude into the vanilla Minecraft experience, so it focuses on making your experience better rather than adding new content.
## Performance
Star is very performant out of the box, and achieves higher framerates than modpacks like Fabulously Optimized.
See for yourself by clicking here
### Star
**Over 800 FPS**
### Fabulously Optimized
700+ FPS
These figures were taken by joining into the same world, waiting a bit, then taking a screenshot. Computer had the same background apps the whole time. Default settings on both modpacks shown. Tests were run on a MacBook Pro 2021 16" with M1 Max and game was run at 1708x960 resolution.
This means that you can save power on laptops, or crank the performance on powerful desktops.
If your system has a powerful graphics card or even a modern iGPU, you can also enable Star's specially-configured version of Complementary Shaders.
Performance with Shaders
Star with shaders hitting nearly 30fps at 1920x1080 resolution, running on an Intel UHD Graphics 770.
## Quality of life changes
Faster launch speed
### Launch speed
Star can start up faster than other modpacks thanks to resource caching, and it also loads into worlds faster. This ensures that you're not left waiting for the game to catch up while still giving you the freedom to use even the fanciest of resource packs.
Improved in-game HUD
### In-game HUD
Star adds a few different things to your game HUD, all intended to improve your gameplay.
It adds some informational elements on the top left like coordinates, framerate, your speed, the current biome, in-game world time, ping and server TPS.
On the middle left you get a minimal HUD with a display for armor and held-item durability. Hopefully you can repair your armor before it breaks!
On the top middle you get:
- Information about what you are looking at
- Entity information (health, name, mob-specific stats)
- Block information
You can also get a minimap and waypoints if you enable the optional mod required for these; see the Optional mods section near the bottom for more info.
Finally, on the bottom middle and right you can see your saturation in your hunger bar and also a clock showing real-life time so you don't lose track of time.
Better block GUIs (crafting, cooking, etc)
### Other game screens
Star has some nice touches for when you're crafting, cooking, enchanting, or even when the game is just paused.
Along with the tasteful background blur, Star adds JustEnoughItems so you can easily search for items, find crafting recipes, lookup brewing ingredients and more, all without having to leave your game.
Many in-game quality of life changes
### In-game
- Adds satisfying camera movement for strafing, turning, jumping, falling, flying, and more, with [Camera Overhaul](https://modrinth.com/mod/cameraoverhaul)
- Adds dynamic lights, so you can put things like torches in your offhand to light the way
- Adds a mod where items you pick up are marked in your hotbar and inventory with a little star until you do something with the items
- Makes it so that items on the ground will start flashing when they're about to despawn
- Adds potion strength to the potion's icon, just like legacy console edition
- Adds tooltips to Shulker boxes so you can see what's inside (with [Shulker Box Tooltips](https://modrinth.com/mod/shulkerboxtooltip))
- Adds tasteful extra particles (with [Visuality](https://modrinth.com/mod/visuality))
- Adds wavy capes (with [WaveyCapes](https://modrinth.com/mod/wavey-capes))
- Adds a zoom function similar to Optifine (with [OK Boomer](https://modrinth.com/mod/ok-boomer))
Better multiplayer
### Multiplayer
When you're playing with others, Star adds an extra level of polish.
Player skins are brought to life with [3D Skin Layers](https://modrinth.com/mod/3dskinlayers) and support additional customization via [Ears](https://modrinth.com/mod/ears) and [Cosmetica](https://modrinth.com/mod/cosmetica)!
No server hosting? No problem! Just open the Open To LAN screen, and you can forward the game port with one click, thanks to UPnP!
Once your friends join, chat messages will have player heads displayed next to them so you know who is who, at a glance.
Star also includes [Simple Voice Chat](https://modrinth.com/plugin/simple-voice-chat) so you can enjoy proximity voice chat or party voice chat with your friends, or on public servers. Fully configurable of course, and you can disable it if you don't like it.
Even more technical changes
### More
In addition to making your gaming experience better, Star also does the following:
- Fixes a number of bugs in the game thanks to the [Debugify](https://modrinth.com/mod/debugify) and [Aiming Fix](https://modrinth.com/mod/aiming-fix) mods
- Speeds up rendering of many parts of Minecraft with [ImmediatelyFast](https://modrinth.com/mod/immediatelyfast)
- Keeps a small memory profile, which lets me give Star its 1GB memory allocation requirement
- Adds autocomplete for NBT tags when writing commands in chat and in command blocks
- Allows borderless windowed fullscreen thanks to the [Borderless Mining](https://modrinth.com/mod/borderless-mining) mod
- Allows you to change the 3D render resolution of Minecraft at any time in-game by pressing **O**, thanks to the [ResolutionControl+](https://modrinth.com/mod/resolution-control-plus) mod
- Adds tons of small but nice changes that I'm sure you'll notice
and much more for you to find... (or you can check the mods list here in Modrinth)
## Requirements
OpenGL 4.6 is required, click for more details
### OpenGL
Star includes the [Sodium mod](https://modrinth.com/mod/sodium), so a modern graphics card supporting **OpenGL 4.6** is required. Older cards without OpenGL 4.6 may not work properly and are unsupported for playing Star. If you're on macOS, please read the macOS section below.
If you're having trouble figuring out what OpenGL you have, check out this part of Sodium's description:
> Most graphics cards released in the past 12 years are compatible. This includes the following hardware:
> Intel HD Graphics 500 Series (Skylake) or newer\
> Nvidia GeForce 400 Series (Fermi) or newer\
> AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series (GCN 1) or newer
2GB RAM recommended, click for more details
### RAM
You'll need a minimum of 1GB RAM allocated to play using Star, and 2GB or more is recommended for the best experience.
VR is currently not supported!
### VR
Star doesn't support VR yet as I'm still working out how to get the best performance with different VR setups, potentially including QuestCraft.
Please check back at a later date.
macOS support requires a Mac from 2018 or later, click for more details
### macOS
OpenGL on macOS is not the best and it doesn't meet Sodium's OpenGL 4.6 requirement, but Star has been tested and works well on **all Macs from 2018 and later**. It's even better on Macs that have Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3 chip).
## Optional mods
Star comes with some optional mods in case you don't like them or don't want the performance hit. Here's a list of them all so you can decide what you may want to enable:
- [Auto Third Person](https://modrinth.com/mod/auto-third-person)
- Automatically puts you in third person when you use an Elytra, Minecart, Boat, Horse, etc
- No performance impact, some people might not like it
- [Better Animations Collection](https://modrinth.com/mod/better-animations-collection)
- Adds all sorts of nice animations for mobs, see the mod page for more details
- Little to no performance impact, some people might not like it
- [NotEnoughAnimations](https://modrinth.com/mod/not-enough-animations)
- Adds animations and makes existing ones look better in the third person, good for multiplayer
- No performance impact, some people might not like it
- [Chunks Fade In](https://modrinth.com/mod/chunks-fade-in)
- Makes newly loaded chunks fade in, like on Bedrock edition
- Little to no performance impact, some people might not like it
- [Journeymap](https://modrinth.com/mod/journeymap)
- Minimap, worldmap and waypoints
- Medium performance impact, some people might not like it
Notable mentions:
- [Camera Overhaul](https://modrinth.com/mod/cameraoverhaul)
- No performance impact, some people might not like it
- [3D Skin Layers](https://modrinth.com/mod/3dskinlayers)
- Small to meidum performance impact, can rarely have major issues on some older GPUs for an unknown reason. Disable if you have extreme performance issues
- [Blur (Fabric)](https://modrinth.com/mod/blur-fabric)
- Medium performance impact when blurs are present, some older GPUs might not like it. Disable if you have extreme performance issues anywhere there are blurs