Happi

Okay so. When you launch minecraft, the game stitches every texture in the game including mods and resource packs into a single image called the texture atlas. The size of this atlas increases as you add more new textures. This is what the vanilla minecraft texture atlas looks like:

I've seen people ask the question before "what is the maximum number of mods you can put on Minecraft. " The answer to this is that there is is no maximum - you can add as many mods as you computer can handle. But what DOES have a maximum size is the texture atlas. If you add enough mods, especially mods that add large textures, eventually you will overrun the texture atlas. When you launch the game, it creates a texture atlas and bases the size off how many textures there are. The atlas is only ever as big as it needs to be to fit all of the textures in all of the blocks and items in the game, so the more mods you add, the bigger your atlas needs to be. The absolute maximum size for the Minecraft texture atlas is 16,384x16,384 pixels. That sounds like a lot, but it's actually not THAT hard to overrun. My Minecraft save, the one I refer to as "the abomination" has actually overrun its texture atlas size.

Here's the caveat, though: for some reason, if you have an NVIDIA graphics card, your maximum texture atlas size is doubled. NVIDIA cards - even lower powered ones - have a maximum texture atlas size of 32,768 x 32,768. This is also relevant if you use higher resolution Minecraft textures like 64x64 or 256x256. Using a 256x texture pack, you'll start overrunning the texture atlas as soon as you add basically any mods if you're on a non-Nvidia GPU.

My new laptop has an LED in the power button. Seperate from the LED keyboard, the power button has a small single LED that changes to red and white seemingly at random.

This laptop also has this Fancy Mode called Hybrid Graphics mode. This combines the integrated graphics of the processor with the actual 5070 TI GPU in the laptop and smart-switches between them for different tasks, to save power (as the 50 series cards are extremely power hungry).

So I looked up the LED in the power button, and found out the color changes denote which GPU the device is using. The white LED means it's on the integrated GPU (which is AMD), and red means it's using the actual NVIDIA card. It's fairly smart about this, and when you launch a game, it always switches to the NVIDIA card.

So I launched my Abomination on my new laptop, and I got this:

I googled this and stared at it for a long minute. I've seen this error before caused by broken mods, but the exact same instance launches fine on my desktop I fiddled with it for a bit and couldn't figure out what on earth was causing this. The next time I launched the game I did my best to watch the logs, and caught the word "exceeds" flying by. After searching the log I found the error: requested texture atlas size exceeds allowed size of 16,384x16,384. And then I realized: the LED in my power button has been white this whole time. The "smart switching" in the hybrid graphics tech didn't pick up on minecraft as a "real game," so didn't launch it on the 5070ti - it launched it on the integrated AMD GPU, with the 16,384x16,384 max texture atlas.

The Abomination started probably 5 or 6 years ago as a custom version of All The Mods 6 on 1.16.5. I started with ATM6 and just kept bolting stuff on, tossing in basically anything that looks vaguely interesting. I have a particular interest in nature/animal mods and furniture mods, so it’s focused on those. I’ve been limping the abomination forwards year by year, generally not moving to a new Minecraft version until all the biggest names have updated. I’ve been on 1.16.5, 1.18.2, and currently living on 1.20.1. It’s gonna take an act of god to get me past 1.20.1 especially as the modding scene has fractured so heavily over NeoForge (XKCD competing standards comic). I’ve used all sorts of crazy methods to maintain *roughly* the same mods since 1.16.5, it’s kind of a ship of Theseus at this point as so many mods from 1.16.5 no longer exist and so many things I had now didn’t exist then, but I’ve honestly tried to keep most of the same stuff.

Minecraft is written in Java, which people who have a better understanding of programming than me routinely point out is just not an amazing language to program a game in. One of the quirks it picked up from being written Java is that it - like one other game I can think of which engages in this insane methodology (✨cities skylines✨) loads *every block in the game into RAM on launch.* To be clear, that’s not every block like every dirt block - anyone who’s played Minecraft will know that whatever wizardry it uses means the performance is unimpacted by the volume of placed blocks - but every UNIQUE block. The more unique blocks you have - if you’ve played and you know what this means, think everything you can see in JEI - into RAM. The more unique blocks, the more RAM you need.

Vanilla Minecraft can run on the potatoest of potato machines, partly because it only has something like 200 or 250 unique blocks (I may be way overshooting that number I’m estimating right now). Every mod you add that adds blocks adds to Minecraft’s ram consumption.

The Abomination started its life with around 300 mods - mostly what was in AMT6 - and I could more or less get it running on 12 gigs of allocated RAM. As it’s grown over the years this number has increased, but the core of the abomination, as massive as it is, will still get off the ground with ~16 gigs allocated without too much trouble.

The primary culprits to the situation in which I currently find myself are two mods which do dynamic asset generation - Every Compat and Paladin’s Furniture. Dynamic generation in Minecraft is a coding trick that mods can pull to procedurally create blocks and assets on launch based on other available blocks. This allows a mod using dynamic generation to, for example, guarantee that a piece of furniture or adds will be available in every wood type, including modded ones, in every hypothetical player’s game by dynamically generating those assets at launch based on every block with the #wood tag and using the already existing textures, instead of the programmer of that mod having to manually create every asset for every wood type they know of which would inevitably leave out someone’s mod somewhere and creates other compatibility problems.

Every Compat generates every imaginable wooden item in the game in every wood type which exists in the game. Paladin’s Furniture does the same - generating a version for every wood, and actually several others - block type in the game of a broad set of furniture pieces. This means that having these two mods present massively increases the number of unique blocks in a pack - a single new wood type creates a full Paladin and Every Compat set, so it creates a couple hundred new blocks every time.

Because I also play with the REST of the utterly obscene situation happening here, including Silent Gear (many, many wood types) Biomes O Plenty & Biomes you’ll go/gone (another ton of wood types), Dynamics, etc etc etc, there are hundreds of wood types in my game. And Every Compat & Paladin’s Furniture dynamically generate sets of several hundred blocks a piece for each of them. The situation rapidly becomes exponential.

The last count I saw my unique block types were in the hundreds of thousands - I think it’s either 200,000 or 600,000, I don’t remember - and my JEI is close to 2,000 pages long. The massive RAM needs are entirely because of this obscene volume of unique blocks. If I remove just those two mods - every Compat and paladin’s furniture - the RAM needs PLUMMET.

The reason this makes everyone so angry is that there’s very strange misconception in a lot of Minecraft technical support communities that no Minecraft save will ever, no matter what you do, need more than 4 GB of ram allocated (already patently false as the newest All The Mods packs don’t launch well with less than 8), that assigning more than that amount of ram is absolutely never necessary, is always stupid and wrong, and will break your game, and that an error that says “you don’t have enough ram assigned” can somehow actually magically mean “you have too much ram assigned” if you have more than 4-6 GB allocated. I have played and tweaked and tested the Abomination at length, and I know for a fact that it needs the amount of ram I feed it because, what do you know, if I give it less it won’t launch and it tells me very clearly that it won’t launch because I have don’t have enough ram allocated, and as soon as I give it what it wants it suddenly starts working again. However, everyone else literally thinks I am either stupid or lying about this, so it is literally impossible for me to troubleshoot, discuss, or seek help for any OTHER problems with this modpack in any public Minecraft space. As soon as they see how much ram is allocated to it they start yelling at me that no Minecraft modpack has ever or will ever need that much ram, that I’ve broken my game by allocating that much ram, and that having that much ram allocated is the cause of it running poorly and I need to assign it 4 GB instead of 40 and it’ll surely run better. I then explain to them that that’s not possible because it literally won’t boot with any less and tells me very clearly that it’s because it doesn’t have enough ram allocated, but somehow “the game continuously tells me that it doesn’t have enough allocated ram until I give it this amount, at which point it stops giving me that error” STILL reads to everyone as “well it must be telling you that because you gave it too much ram and if you just keep giving it less you’ll stop seeing the error that says it doesn’t have enough.” It absolutely baffles me, and it’s entirely down to this weird conception that Minecraft NEVER needs more ram no matter what (this is very common on Reddit) despite that just…not being even sort of true.

There ARE problems with assigning Minecraft massive amounts of Ram due to what Java calls garbage collection, which is a whole other uber-complex can of Minecraft worms, but I have a mile long string of slightly customized Java launch arguments I stole from someone on Reddit that keeps my garbage collection situation under control. But nonetheless it makes people Extremely Angry, so i basically have to simply play it in solitude, troubleshoot it (and its ever growing, extremely plentiful, errors) myself, and explain it in deep detail to anyone who wants to know about it to head off them yelling at me.

I’ll post some more technical details on it tomorrow including my shaders, JVM args, actual mod count, etc, tomorrow.

But I’m gonna post this poll because it’s gonna be fun as hell

BTW, for anyone wondering: Minecraft being written in Java is why this dual-GPU issue happened.

Oh my god it's him! And in one of my favourite now canon civilian jobs for him, fuck yes

Obvious disclaimer that you shouldn't have wild animals as pets.

But like, cheetahs are the only large cats that keepers will do free contact with. Hell, even most small cats don't get free contact. (Because small cats can be VICIOUS. They'll have a baby pallas cat wearing thicker gloves than when handling an owl. Because small cats can just be vicious.)

Like I think the only other cat at our zoo where I've seen free contact with was servals? Because I know they've used servals in shows to demonstrate their natural jumping ability. But I know servals can sometimes have a mean temper as well. Meanwhile they'll do the cheetah run and afterwards put the mic by the cheetahs and it's just like an engine with them purring. It's fascinating to watch when the message in every other large animal is "no free contact because it's dangerous even when they're born in captivity".

really helpful technique ^ once you know how to divide by halves and thirds it makes drawing evenly spaced things in perspective waaay easier: