What the mod does
LCull is an open source client mod created by Starlev with the help of artificial intelligence. It focuses on one rendering task. The mod stops the client from drawing entities that sit outside the active camera view.
Minecraft passes loaded entities to the render pipeline even when they stand behind you or outside your screen view. That process forces the hardware to spend resources on things you cannot see. LCull checks each entity bounding box against the view frustum that the game builds each frame. If the entire box falls outside the visible area, the game skips drawing that entity completely.
Camera movement and field of view adjustments can cause entities near the edge of the screen to flicker. LCull addresses this with a small cache for each entity. The cache stores the last visibility decision using the entity position, a quantized camera position, and view direction. Look, it only updates the culling state after the camera view stays stable for a few ticks. And this hysteresis prevents constant recalculations on every frame.
Performance and ideal setups
LCull targets scenes packed with thousands of entities, such as custom minigame lobbies, crowded multiplayer hubs, and maps with heavy display entity counts. The project description states that pairing LCull with Sodium and Entity Culling doubles their speed in heavy scenarios.
This is not a general boost for every setup. The mod isn't effective in singleplayer worlds where the simulation loop creates the primary bottleneck. It also provides no help in scenes with low entity counts.
Limitations and trade-offs
LCull uses frustum checks rather than occlusion culling. It can't hide entities that sit behind walls or solid blocks. The result only removes things that are outside the camera field of view.
Running frustum math on the render thread increases overall CPU load. Off-screen entities also disappear the instant they exit your view. In addition, other mods that expect every loaded entity to run a render pass on every frame might show unexpected behavior.
Technical details
LCull is strictly required on the client and is unsupported on dedicated servers. It's licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only. The mod runs on Forge and Neoforge loaders.
Supported Minecraft versions include 1.20.1, 1.21, 1.21.1, 1.21.4, 1.21.6, 1.21.7, 1.21.8, 1.21.9, 1.21.10, 1.21.11, 26.1, 26.1.1, 26.1.2, and 26.2.
