Pixlriffs – What Is… Optifine? ▫ The Minecraft Survival Guide (Tutorial Lets Play) [Part 63]

Hello everyone my name is Pixar IFS and welcome back to the Minecraft Survival Guide I hope you guys are having a good day today we’re starting off down here in the slime farm and you might be wondering why considering that this project is functionally at least pretty much complete a few people have

Suggested improvements in the comments and thank you for that but considering the amount of slime I’m now getting out of this thing I don’t really need to worry too much about that instead what I’m worried about is getting all of these resources out of here because we

Have so much stone cobble all these various different stone and dirt things we’ve got like a whole double chest of several of them we’ve also got a few extra rare resources the beacon and stuff is still down here basically I need to clear all these resources out of

Here now because I’m done with the slime farm project and with that taken care of we don’t really need to come down here again I can block off the sky access kind of hole there and we can just continue to use this thing as a functioning slime farm for the rest of

Our days but since this isn’t exactly a great subject for a tutorial I thought I would spend today’s episode doing something a little bit different while I do the cleanup around the world that is so desperately needed and so for today’s episode we’re going to be introducing

Optifine to you guys and Optifine is a word you may have heard me use before it’s actually a client-side mod for the game which improves performance and gives you a little bit more control over how the game looks and behaves in some cases especially on some low performance

Systems Optifine can actually mean the difference between playing with like a decent say like 30 fps and playing with about 10 or 15 for some people it really is a very very helpful mod and to that end I thought we might as well introduce it first so it’s worth noting before we

Begin that this is actually only going to apply to the Java edition of the game and that’s because well the bedrock edition of the game doesn’t really need this kind of mod it’s already pretty well optimized for performance it’s written in a completely different programming language from the Java

Edition and can work pretty well even on low-end systems even on my old PC and which I have a bit of a beastly PC now but I used to play Windows 10 edition on my old PC and it ran a lot better than the Java Edition did in terms of frame

Rate and the amount of render distance I could have and that kind of thing because it’s coded differently it works a little bit differently whereas on old PC I had to rely on Optifine quite heavily in order to get the kind of performance that I wanted in order to be

Able to play and record at 60 frames per second Optifine was kind of essential so for folks who are having performance problems in Minecraft it is usually kind of the first thing you try to say have you installed Optifine because it’s one of those things that can absolutely make

Or break the games performance on certain systems so the first thing we’re going to do is show you guys how to install up to fine and then after that we’ll run through some of the options that are available to you and Optifine and I’ll tell you more about what it

Actually does to get hold of up to fine you want to go to Optifine dotnet Optifine opt ifin e dotnet and you’ll hit downloads when you get to this page the first home page will tell you a little bit more about the features of alt to find some stuff that we can’t be

Covering later on in today’s video but you want to hit downloads and depending on which version of minecraft you’re running there are different versions of Optifine for example if you’re running on the most recent version minecraft one point 13 point 2 the download will be available at the top here and Optifine

HD ultra is basically the version of Optifine more or less so we want to hit download on that and we’ll be able to download it obviously if you’re playing in an earlier version there are archived versions from previous games so for example if you’re playing a mod pack

That only works in 1.10 or maybe 1.12 it is still possible to download Optifine to help you with the performance of that mod pack that’s a little bit more technical so we won’t necessarily get into that quite yet but for example if you’re one of those people who prefers

Minecraft combat before 1.9 came around then you might want to go and get some earlier versions of Optifine from this page they all seem to be archived here now once you’ve decided which version you want to download you’re gonna hit the download button here and occasionally this will generate a couple

Of popup ads things that you need to close stuff like that unfortunately that’s just how the internet tends to work how people like this need to make their money and it’ll take you to this page where you can simply click the download link here that says download

Optifine one point thirteen point two HD you edition five dot jar and we’ll click on that and that’s just gonna start a download for us once it’s downloaded which should be very quick it should give you a Java executable file and all you need to do is double click on this

To open up a launcher it will say the installer will install Optifine it in the official minecraft launcher and will create a new profile in to find for it it will show you the folder where minecraft is installed on your computer and all you really need to

Do is hit install it’ll give you a message saying Optifine has been successfully installed and then the next time you load up the minecraft Launcher it’s going to look a little bit different because right down here at the bottom here it will say play and it will

Give you the profile name for this Optifine profile Optifine is now going to be available alongside the latest release of minecraft here in the launcher so you’ll be able to access at any time or switch back to the regular default vanilla version of Minecraft if

You want to and for the purposes of this video I’m going to log in with the latest release of minecraft first to give you an idea of what options are available and what exactly Optifine changes so here we are logged in with regular vanilla minecraft no Optifine no

Nothing and can you tell the difference right now there’s some stuff I’m looking at here that is actually very different to what we’re used to and it’s to do with the cloud height because one of the things Optifine actually allows you to do is adjust the cloud height so it

Doesn’t interfere with your builds whereas in regular minecraft you can either have the option to switch off clouds or they appear at this height and it’s a little bit irritating when you’re building up high I don’t necessarily want my buildings to be shrouded in these blocky clouds all the

Time so that’s another really cool feature that I’ll – fine hairs but aside from that on my PC at least you probably won’t notice a huge amount of difference just wandering around your Minecraft world in this case because my computer has decent sort of performance it’s not

Gonna see that much in the way of frame drops the main thing you want to look at when it comes to the differences between vanilla and Optifine is the video options which are going to be in here in the options menu let’s open these up and you might be familiar with these already

A few mucked about with some of the settings some of these things are going to affect your performance quite heavily fancy graphics is the thing that allows leaves to be transparent if you turn fancy graphics off if you switch it too fast all of the leaves become opaque

Which is not immediately that noticeable but once you’ve played with it for a while it becomes very noticeable smooth lighting is also a big one that kind of smooths out the differences in lighting between blocks and so yeah you notice that it’s it’s changing a little bit

Here it’s not as visible up here on the surface but as soon as you get to anywhere that’s got kind of shadows and things like that you’ll notice it quite heavily particles is another big one there lot of particles in Minecraft things like the little sparks that come off a

Nether portal the enchantment table particles stuff like that potion brewing particles all that sort of stuff can be disabled or at least turned down to its minimal amount in the vanilla minecraft interface and that’s kind of useful for performance purposes things like entity shadows and stuff like that

There are small little things that you can change that will help your performance a little bit just in vanilla but it’s nowhere near the level of customization afforded to you by Optifine to demonstrate quite how different this is I’m going to switch over to Optifine and load up this screen

And you’ll see the differences immediately and here we are without two finds so the first thing you’ll notice is there’s actually a background here you can kind of see when stuff is sneaking up on you if you’re paused in a multiplayer world or a single Claire

Well that’s open to land but as you can see down here in the bottom left we have the Optifine version number clearly displayed here and there are a lot more options on the screen for us to play with things like fancy graphics and smooth lighting are still here there is

A smooth lighting slider which allows you to control this a little bit more the GUI scale and brightness and so forth are all going to be mostly the same likewise the render distance and the max fps down here is where things really start to change you have options

Like dynamic lights which is not something that is available in vanilla minecraft likewise the shaders and there are much more granular much more detailed options when it comes to quality when it comes to performance animations that appear and that kind of stuff and the animations is where things

Like particles are going to appear and water and fire and that kind of stuff you can actually switch some of these off individually to customize the experience of how many particles and stuff appear in your world and that allows you to fine-tune your performance so you might want to turn all of them

Off if you’re playing with the kind of computer that really can’t handle all of this animation happening in the background while you’re just trying to build something alternatively you might want to switch all of them on but if some things kind of irritate you like hair swirly that nether portal is in the

Background or the fact that you don’t want rain to appear you can take that off as well there are little individual things you can tweak here that will customize your Minecraft experience when we go over to the quality settings you’ll find stuff like better grass which if you switch that on has a

Profound impact on your world turning some of the grass blocks into grass blocks on all different sites where they connect to another grass block it will actually smooth the texture over the sides and make your entire landscape look like a rolling hill and that’s a matter of preference really that’s

Something that I tend to leave off a lot of the time because I like the experience of vanilla minecraft but some people can’t live without stuff like this they even do it for things like path blocks now it’s quite a sophisticated addition to this mod it also does this for grass which is

Covered with a snow layer making it look entirely like a snow block and I find that more of a disadvantage than an advantage mainly because I like to harvest snow from time to time and just finding a snow block like that and thinking it’s a snow block when it’s

Actually a block of grass just with some snow on the top can can throw you off a little bit but this is something you might want to try if you’re installing Optifine in your Minecraft client because it’s it’s actually kind of fun to experience Minecraft with a slightly

Different visual style another key thing which makes Optifine a mod that a lot of people can’t live without is that it defaults to having connected glass textures which means that anytime you would have a set of glass panes or glass blocks of the same color next to each other their textures actually connect

Removing the borders this might not be the most immediately obvious thing but here is the connected Optifine version of this texture and here is the vanilla version of this texture notice how much clearer the Optifine one is because it doesn’t have those lines in between every single glass pane or glass block

That is one of the great things about Optifine and one of the things a lot of people find they really can’t live without a lot of the options here in the quality settings menu actually depend on whether or not you have a resource pack installed if you’re playing with a

Resource pack something that changes the textures and sounds of Minecraft then you might also have a custom sky for that resource pack which is something you can enable here you might have custom entity models things like you know a different model for zombies and skeletons that kind of stuff things like

That can be provided by the current resource pack as the like hover over text will show you here and in fact the one of the great things Optifine does is offers hover over text so you can actually see what these different options are going to be doing when you

Enable or disable them the hover over text and Optifine will even tell you what the certain benchmarks are for render distance and that’s actually really really useful right now I play with a 16 chunk render distance and it even tells you here that that’s gonna show you 256 meters that’s 256 blocks because

Each block in Minecraft is supposed to be a meter and Optifine will allow you to boost the render distance beyond 32 chunks which is the standard for vanilla minecraft that is that the highest that you can possibly go in vanilla minecraft Optifine will let you know that you can

See ludicrously far in fact you can actually adjust your render distance so that it is 48 or 64 chunks which is an absolutely massive range and it’s almost the same as what you might get in the bedrock edition of Minecraft because that has a massive render distance in

The background unlike in the bedrock Edition though if you turn your render distance up that high the farms that you can see in the very distance might actually work obviously as it’s showing us here you need a lot of RAM and a lot of processing power to deal with render

Distances that high i only ever used them for taking screenshots because let’s face it when i’m standing here in the basin it’s kind of nice to have some of these mountains sort of misty in the background and i’m not really gonna be able to see 64 chunks from where i am

Anyway i can barely see one chunk over in this direction because I’m standing next to a hill so it’s really something that you only ever need if you’re taking aerial screenshots of your world or something like that the fact is Optifine gives you the option to do that which is very very

Cool let’s move on to the performance menu because this contains some of the more you know programming wizardry kind of stuff that is really going to make a difference to the performance of your world right now I’m playing with smooth world enabled because that’s a setting that only really helps with

Single-player worlds it kind of smooths over any hiccups that your computer might have whilst it’s rendering in new terrain and kind of you know creating occasional lag spikes for stuff like redstone updates and things like that that will take care of that most of the time it’s still possible to have a few

Performance issues with that especially if you’ve got a lower-end system but it might be worth doing if you’ve got a single-player world the other options here smooth FPS fast render and fast math are all worth experimenting with they’re the kind of thing that will increase your FPS substantially by

Optimizing rendering algorithms and if that sounds like a complicated sentence to you don’t worry it does to me as well dynamic updates will prioritize chunk loading when you’re standing still so the world will still kind of render normally as you move through it but it will prioritize rendering all of the

Around you while you’re just standing still meaning that you can hang out in an area for a while to load a world render regions works best if your render distance is turned up super high and once again is one of those things that if you’ve got a better graphics card

It’s going to work a little bit better and smart animations will make sure things like fire is only animated when it’s on the screen allowing for a little bit more of a performance boost because minecraft isn’t constantly having to render all that fire that’s behind you basically the performance settings menu is where

You should go if you want to preserve like the visual look of your Minecraft if you don’t want to turn off particles or anything like that but you still need a bit of a performance boost from Optifine because a lot of this stuff is the mathematical side of the things in

The code that’s gonna happen in the background while not generally speaking effect what minecraft looks like for you going into the details menu here this is actually where you can adjust some of the details in your world in a more specific way for example the cloud height that I mentioned you can adjust

That to quite an extent this is what it looks like normally when clouds are just at their regular height but thanks to Optifine we can actually boost that up to like 256 blocks so the clouds actually appear above the build height for the world meaning that they’re never

Going to interfere with your builds in any way and you can still adjust the cloud so that they’re flat so that they disappear entirely that kind of stuff is all available to you here likewise trees you can set those to fast or fancy without changing any of the other fancy

Graphics settings in the world rain and snow can be toggled here and I know for a lot of people rain and snow can present quite a hefty performance problem like when it starts raining your framerate starts to dip because it’s rendering all of the rain particles and

Stuff like that so that’s the kind of thing you might want to switch off if you’re having performance problems and it rains a lot in your world now generally speaking I don’t see a lot of rain in the single-player series because I’m sleeping the entire time which

Resets the weather cycle and I don’t spend a lot of time in snowy biomes but occasionally it can happen and if you want to set the rain off if you don’t want the ambience of the rain and snow that kind of stuff then it’s it’s worth messing with this setting a little bit

There are some sky settings if you don’t want the Sun and Moon to be there if you want the sky to be on or off which you know can happen if you want your sky to look like this you can make some changes to the fog which you can actually kind

Of see in the background if you put fancy fog on the fog will actually work in more of a curved radius around you which prevents things like say for example the iron farm that’s over there when you look at it with fancy fog turned off there you go see it’s disappearing into

The fog with fast fog on but then when I rotate my field of view that way it actually becomes a lot more clear because of the way minecraft typically renders fog if I switch on fancy fog that doesn’t happen as much it applies the fog in more of a

Circular area so it’s always going to be centered on where you’re standing and the fog effect is basically the same and I can’t decide whether I like that more or not I kind of like being able to look out of the corner of my eye and see

Things in a little bit more clarity so that’s a setting that I might tweak back again in a minute there are some things you can change in here like the vignette which is the shading that happens around the screen corners when you’re in first-person mode it’s not the biggest

Deal in the world but it might have a bit of an effect on the FPS if you’re playing in full screen stuff like that there are a few other things that you can mess with here but most of these are fairly trivial so I’m not going to cover

Them but it’s worth poking around in if you want to customize your Minecraft experience a little bit more now the animations menu we’ve already covered going over to other here there are a few more technical sides of things where you can have a lag or matter or a debug profiler

If you press f3 those will show up if you’re playing in a single-player world you can actually switch off the weather here and it says weather control is only possible for local worlds because that’s effectively like setting a command which switches off the weather entirely if you

Don’t want to play with rain or snow at all in a single-player world that is possible in a multiplayer world obviously not so much because that’s determined by the server settings and it’s the kind of thing that only an admin would be able to do with commands

Now likewise another option that you can only really affect if you have admin privileges over your world if you’re in single-player is the time setting which will actually disable either day or night if you want it to so you can have a full day and then the day completely

Resets itself the Sun just arises on the other side of the horizon again and you don’t have to deal with nighttime at all that’s something that you can mess with if you really want to but obviously we’re playing survival minecraft here it’s not the kind of thing that I would

End up doing I tend to keep this on the default basically at all times but if for whatever reason it gets switched to something else and you’re wondering why you don’t get night times or why the Sun never seems to come up check this setting because there’s a chance you’ve

Accidentally toggled it on at some point and you’ll end up with a time setting that’s either day only or night only and now I’ve headed down into a cave system because there are a couple of really fun options to find that I want to show you and the

First is dynamic lighting now normally when you walk around minecraft holding a torch it doesn’t actually illuminate anything until you place it on a wall right so for example here I’m walking around this cave you’ll notice the shadows around me do not change and we’re not actually affecting the light

Level in the area by holding a torch in your hand and some people might find that not particularly realistic because if you’re holding a lit torch if it’s a little when you place it on a block then surely it should appear that way when it’s in your hand rather than whether

It’s in the offhand or in the main hand now dynamic lighting is a resource that they’ve added to Optifine that actually allows you to have the light in your hand when you’re walking around a cave notice how bright the walls are becoming when I walk towards them it’s actually

Allowing the torch to light your way and as you go deeper into these caves even if there aren’t light sources around you will find that your torch can light your way through the cave and things are updating as you go now note that this is not something that affects the actual

Light level of these blocks so if you’re walking around a cave like this you are not stopping mobs from spawning mobs won’t spawn next to the player anyway because that’s not how minecraft works but it can be a little bit risky using this if you’re not familiar with combat

In Minecraft because you will end up thinking that the way is super well lit and that you’re exploring this cave without any mobs turning up but when it comes to turning around and leaving the cave again all of the mobs will have spawned behind you because you didn’t like the cave up in

The first place it does not affect block light in any way in fact if I’m standing let’s let’s create a dark section of the cave here and I need to take the torch out of my hand so I can tell it’s a dark section of the cave let’s grab this like

So oh it will also apply by the way to items which are thrown on the ground like that so that’s all she’s not placed it’s simply thrown there it is going to de-spawn after a few minutes but once we pick it up you’ll notice the cave gets a

Lot darker the same by the way applies to any light emitting blocks so if you have glowstone or a sea lantern in your hand it does exactly the same thing but if I stand right here holding a torch and I open the f3 mode to show you guys

The block light level you’ll notice the light level over there is still zero until I place a torch down and then it becomes 14 so like I said we are still allowing for Spore noble space to appear in these caves we’re just lighting our way dying

Emily as we go and it’s up to you whether or not you want to use that personally I like to switch it off because when it comes to lighting up areas on the surface if I want to light up an area for a build to make sure that

Mobs don’t spawn dynamic lighting throws that off a little bit I can see where the dark patches are if I have dynamic lighting disabled and I can tell oh yeah that’s where a torch needs to go so that I can make sure the area is lit but then

If you’re wandering around with torches in your hand and playing with dynamic lighting it can get a little bit distracting it can become very difficult to tell exactly where lighting is needed so generally speaking that’s not a setting I tend to play with all that

Much but it can be worth it for a little bit of immersion if you guys want now the other thing I’m sure people are excited about when it comes to Optifine is the ability to use shaders which are also available from the video settings menu here and you’ve seen me use them in

The past for shaders tours of the world and for time lapses and things like that now shader packs aren’t part of Optifine by default you will actually have to go out and find them and it’s up to your kind of preference which ones you like

You might want to play around with a few different ones personally I like to go to minecraft forum dotnet where you’ll find things like Silver’s shaders which are the shader pack that I use probably the most out of everything but when it comes to websites you do have to be a

Little bit wary about some websites which are advertising things like shaders because the shader packs might not always be up to date the website might be a little bit dodgy you just have to be careful when you’re browsing online and if you’re not sure about any

Of this then ask somebody who knows when you’ve downloaded the shader pack it’s not going to show up here immediately because it’s probably just gonna end up in your downloads folder but if you come into minecraft and click shaders folder down here it will directly open the

Shader packs folder allowing you to drop them in now make sure they stay as zip files that’s how a Minecraft tends to read shader packs like this if we go back into minecraft now we’ll be able to enable silva’s vibrant shaders and you’ll see what a difference this makes

To the world there you go here is our shader pack and typically when I’m playing with shaders I have clouds off because the clouds look a little bit glitchy and they are kind of distracting considering that there is a really nice-looking sky beyond them so let’s

Quickly go in and switch those off we go into details switch clouds off there we go that’s a lot better and you’ll find even the shaders themselves have a menu down here that allows you to customize the performance of them you can increase or decrease render quality to help performance

A little bit you can switch anti-aliasing on or off and the shader options menu here will give you a whole range of options depending on the shader you’re using at the time so for example Silda shaders has options for things like cell shading has things like adjusting the bloom that happens when

You look at a light source things like godrays in the sky that kind of stuff you can adjust all of that here if some of this is not to your taste and that’s where you can find things like water animations and stuff like that one of

The other shader packs I like to use arcane shaders has a completely different set of shader options which allow for post-processing there’s like a tone mapping option here you can end up with cinematic mode that adds kind of black bars to this so it looks more like you’re filming some kind of widescreen

Video and shaders used to actually be their own separate mod back in the day but now they’ve been integrated with Optifine they’re so much easier to use and this is kind of how you get shaders in Minecraft now is just to install Optifine grab your favorite shader pack

And get started one last feature that I can’t believe I’ve forgotten to mention until now is the zoom function and this appears in the controls menu so it’s completely separate from the rest of the Optifine settings if you scroll down here to the miscellaneous you’ll find a

Zoom function in here which I have bound to the C key I think that’s usually the default for it but you might want to go in there and change it if you can’t find it if for whatever reason it doesn’t have a key binding for you and that

Allows you to zoom in and automatically enable cinematic camera so your zoom view kind of drifts around smoothly instead of being super jerky like this for example like I’ve just disabled cinematic camera and wow that is a little bit hyperactive for my liking so yeah smooth is what we want and you’ll

Notice occasionally I zoom in to show you guys some stuff in better clarity in this episode and it’s a great way of doing that without having to open the options menu move your field of view slider in and zoom it you can zoom even further if you have the field of view

Slider set to 30 so it can be pretty intense it’s great for taking some long-distance screen shots it kind of acts like a telescope but you don’t want to use it all that much especially with your field of view like this and that’s gonna wrap up this episode of the

Minecraft Survival Guide I’m actually going to head out to the end and grab myself some more shulker boxes because I’ll need a few extra shelcha boxes to move some of this stuff out of the slime farm and I’ve kind of used all of my shocker boxes for other things

Right now so I think it’s time for a trip out to the end I’m gonna use my light shirt to fly between some n cities find myself a few extra shelcha boxes off-camera and I’ll be back with another episode tomorrow but that’s got to be it for this episode of the Minecraft Survival

Guide thank you so much for watching my name is Ben Pixar ifs don’t forget to leave a like on this episode if you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and I’ll see you guys soon take care bye for now