0.5.3 — five new optimizations, 1.20.1 line

The same five that landed in 0.6.5 for 1.20.4, ported to 1.20.1. The vanilla methods involved turned out to be identical between the two versions, so nothing had to be reworked.

Particle culling. Vanilla never frustum-checks particles: renderParticles walks every live particle in the world and builds geometry for each of them, including the ones behind your back. Only rendering is skipped here — ticking is untouched, so particles do not freeze off-screen and then pop in when you turn around.

Merged draws inside a region batch. For QUADS the shared index buffer simply walks quads in order while baseVertex shifts the start, so two sections that sit back-to-back in the arena can be drawn by one sub-draw with the sum of their index counts. A freshly built region collapses from up to 64 sub-draws down to a handful. The translucent layer is deliberately left out: it has its own per-section sorted indices and a strict back-to-front order.

Translucent re-sort distance limit (128 blocks). Vanilla re-sorts translucent faces every time the camera moves one block. A hundred blocks away that rotates a section by a fraction of a degree and the sort gives back the very same order. Distant sections now keep the order they got when they were built, and vanilla's budget of 15 sort tasks goes to the near ones, where it matters.

Index buffer bound once per arena. The element-array binding is part of VAO state, and the shared sequential buffer keeps its id when it grows — so rebinding it for every region in every frame was pure waste.

Fog culling — off by default. Past FogEnd vanilla's linear fog returns plain fog colour, so a region that drowned in fog need not be drawn at all. It stays off until it is checked by eye in the Nether and underwater: the sky is drawn before terrain, in its own pass with its own fog, and what shows through culled geometry is not guaranteed to match.

Every one of the five has its own switch in config/vodium.properties. None of them is measured yet — they are reasoned from how vanilla works, not from a benchmark, which is why this is a beta.