What It Does
Fast Items changes how item entities look when they're sitting on the ground. Normally Minecraft draws every dropped item as a small 3D model, even flat ones like potion bottles. That means the game renders side faces nobody really looks at. This mod flattens that out. Items that are naturally flat, such as potions, lose their side faces entirely and render as flat 2D sprites. Items that are normally cube-shaped, like blocks, don't get flattened the same way, instead they are turned into billboards that rotate to always face your camera. That's the same approach you'll have seen in Lunar Client and similar third-party clients.
The goal behind both changes is the same: cut down what the game has to draw for every item on the ground, especially when there are a lot of them stacked up.
Who It's For
This is a client-side mod, so it's built for players who want to install something on their own game without needing the server to run anything extra. If you spend time around item-heavy spots, drop parties, farms with auto-collection, big loot piles after a raid, this is the kind of mod meant for that situation. Because the server doesn't need it, you can run it solo even on servers you do not manage, and it'll not change what other players see on their end.
Configuration
Fast Items ships with a handful of toggles so you can tune exactly what gets changed:
- Enable this mod: on by default
- Render entity shadows for items: on by default
- Render the sides of 2D items: off by default
- Affects 3D models such as blocks: on by default
That last toggle matters if you want cube-shaped items to keep their normal look while still getting the 2D treatment for flat items, or the other way around. Look, you can turn each piece on or off independently.
Compatibility
Fast Items needs to be installed on the client. It's marked as unsupported on the server side, so there is nothing to add to a server pack for this one. It builds for Fabric, Forge, and Neoforge, so it should fit into whichever of those three loaders your setup already uses.
On versions, it's listed as supporting 1.20, 1.20.1, 1.21, 1.21.1, 1.21.2, 1.21.3, and 1.21.4. Those are the specific releases it declares, so don't assume anything outside that list, including versions that might come logically before or after it, is covered.
The mod is released under the Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal license. That means the author has given up copyright claims on it. If you want to look at how it works or build something similar, the code is open for that.
