Player guide
Install Modrinth, add Fabulously Optimized, and tune the look - about 15 minutes start to finish. Everything here is client-side only and safe on the server.
Before you start
Steps 1 to 5 are all you need for smooth, good-looking gameplay. Everything after that is optional - it lives under Advanced setup at the back.
Modrinth is a free mod host with its own launcher. The launcher is what makes modpacks, shaders and resource packs a one-click job instead of a folder-dragging job, so use it rather than installing mods by hand.
Fabulously Optimized (FO) is a performance and graphics modpack. It is client-side only and built to stay 100% server-compatible - it deliberately ships no minimap, no armour HUD and nothing that changes gameplay. Expect roughly double the frame rate over vanilla, plus shader support.
Older clients connect, but 26.2 is the one that works properly
Server address
| Live world map | See the whole world in your browser - terrain, town borders and markers - without being in game. Handy for picking where to settle, and for finding your way home on a second screen. |
| All player guides | Command reference, plugin guides, rank perks and the rest, as downloadable PDFs. |
Bookmark these
Fabulously Optimized deliberately ships no minimap, so this is the first thing you should add. JourneyMap is the recommended one: it has a proper release build for 26.2 on Fabric, it is allowed here, and its waypoint system is the reason it beats the alternatives on a Towny server where you are constantly hopping between your town, a mine and someone else's shop.
| Minimap | Corner map that fills in as you explore, with a fullscreen version and a browser-based map of everything you have personally seen. |
| Waypoints | Mark anywhere and get an on-screen beacon and distance readout. Name them, colour them, group them per world. |
| Deathpoints | Automatic waypoint where you died. This alone justifies installing it. |
| Multi-world | Keeps separate maps per dimension, so the Nether does not overwrite the overworld. |
Default keys: J opens the fullscreen map, B drops a waypoint where you are looking. Inside the fullscreen map, O is settings and F re-centres on you. The rest are under Options > Controls.
Set your waypoints on day one
Same method as JourneyMap: in the Modrinth App, browse content with the type filter set to Resource Packs, install one to your FO instance, then enable it in game under Options > Resource Packs. FO includes the whole OptiFine-parity stack, so packs advertising connected textures, custom entity models, animated textures or custom GUIs all work properly here, which is not true of a plain Fabric install.
| Fresh Animations | Overhauls how every mob moves. The most transformative single pack you can add, and it needs EMF and ETF - both already in FO. |
| Faithful / Stay True | Higher-resolution takes on the vanilla look. Safe, cheap, hard to dislike. |
| 32x and above | Look excellent, cost real memory. If you run a 64x pack, give the instance 6 GB and expect longer load times. |
That is the whole setup. Everything past this point is optional.
Optional from here on. Memory tuning, what is already in the pack, adding your own mods, shaders, and extra add-ons. Skip it all and the game still runs fine.
Modrinth's default allocation is conservative. Bumping it is the single biggest fix for stutter, especially once shaders are involved.
Check this list before you install anything else. Installing a mod that is already in the pack is the most common way people break their game - you end up with two copies fighting each other and a crash on startup.
| Sodium, Lithium | The core rendering and server-tick optimisers. Most of your FPS gain comes from these two. |
| Iris | Shader loader. Shaders work out of the box - see the Shaders section. |
| Sodium Extra | The extra video options menu: fog, weather, particle and detail toggles. Also Reese's Sodium Options for the layout. |
| EntityCulling, MoreCulling | Stop drawing things you cannot see. Big wins in towns and around mob farms. |
| ModernFix, FerriteCore | Faster startup, lower memory use. |
| ImmediatelyFast | Speeds up HUD, text and item rendering. |
| Dynamic FPS | Throttles the game when it is in the background so it stops cooking your laptop while you are in Discord. |
| Mod Menu | The mod list and per-mod config screen. This is where you configure everything you add later. |
| Zoomify | Spyglass-style zoom on a key. Allowed here. |
| ETF, EMF, Continuity | Entity Texture Features, Entity Model Features and connected textures - the OptiFine parity layer that makes fancy resource packs work. |
| Animatica, Polytone, OptiGUI | More OptiFine-format resource pack support: animated textures, custom colours, custom GUIs. |
| LambDynamicLights | Held torches and glowing mobs actually light the world. |
| Controlify | Full controller support if you want it. |
| Fabric API | The library everything else depends on. Never remove it. |
Do not install these again
You can add anything you like on top of FO as long as it passes three checks. Get into the habit of running them on the Modrinth project page before you click install, and you will never break your client.
To install one: open your FO instance, go to its Content tab, click Add Content, search, and install. The app keeps your additions separate from the pack's own mods, so updating FO later will not wipe them.
The one rule that explains most 'why isn't this working'
MCLastoria is a fair-play server. Nothing you can buy here gives a combat advantage, so nothing you install should either. If you are unsure about a specific mod, ask staff before you use it rather than after.
Iris already ships with Fabulously Optimized, so there is nothing to install first - you just add a shader pack. In the Modrinth App, browse content with the type filter set to Shaders, install one to your FO instance, then in game go to Options > Video Settings > Shader Packs and switch it on.
LOW-END - integrated graphics, older laptops
| MakeUp - Ultra Fast | Built specifically for a good look-to-cost ratio. The usual first choice if frames matter more than drama. |
| Miniature Shader | Extremely light, still gives you shadows and reflections. |
| Just Colored Lighting | Coloured light with almost no cost. Its own page says it is aimed at potato computers. |
BALANCED - most gaming PCs
| Complementary Reimagined | The safe default. Vanilla-faithful, enormously popular, heavily configurable. Start here. |
| BSL Shaders | Bright and colourful, long-standing and reliable. |
| Sildur's Vibrant | Ships in tiered editions, so you can dial it to your hardware. |
HIGH-END - dedicated GPU
| Complementary Unbound | Same family as Reimagined, more dramatic lighting. |
| Solas | Coloured lighting, strong atmosphere. |
| Bliss | Heavy and very pretty. |
| Alpha Piscium | Aiming at realism. Expect to pay for it in frames. |
Euphoria Patches adds extra effects on top of the Complementary packs. It is installed as a mod called Euphoria Patcher, which patches the shader for you - it does nothing on its own, so only add it if you are running Complementary.
Two popular packs are not available for 26.2
Distant Horizons draws terrain far beyond your render distance. On most servers the mod can only show you ground you have personally walked through, because that is all your client has ever been sent. MCLastoria runs the matching server plugin, which is the part most servers do not have - the terrain is sent to you directly, so the view fills in the first time you look at it, including places you have never been.
| How far you see | The server sends terrain out to 128 chunks - 2,048 blocks. Your own render distance setting is untouched; Distant Horizons draws everything past it. |
| Where it works | The main survival world only. The Nether, the End, the resource world and the creative worlds have it switched off deliberately. |
| Live updates | Build something large and players within 2,048 blocks see it appear in the distance straight away, rather than on their next visit. |
| Where it stops | Terrain data ends 10,000 blocks from spawn in every direction, which is the edge of the generated world. Past that there is nothing to show and nothing to find. |
If it costs you frames, turn it down before you turn it off
Players without the mod are unaffected in every way. Nothing about it changes the game you are playing - only how far you can see it.
All of these are client-side, all have 26.2 Fabric builds, and none of them affect anyone else's game. Add them one at a time so that if something does go wrong you know what caused it.
| Emotecraft | Player emotes. Worth calling out because MCLastoria runs the Emotecraft plugin server-side, so other players actually see your emotes. Install the client build that matches - 3.4.0-b.build.162. |
| Sound Physics Remastered | Real reverb and occlusion. Caves and town halls suddenly sound like caves and town halls. Currently a beta build for 26.2. |
| AmbientSounds | Layered background ambience per biome and time of day. |
| Presence Footsteps | Footstep sounds that match the block you are walking on. |
| Not Enough Animations | First and third person animations for eating, drinking and climbing. Purely local - others see you as normal. |
| 3D Skin Layers | Renders the second skin layer with actual depth. Small change, very noticeable. |
| Visuality | Extra ambient particles - sparkles, splashes, hit effects. |
| Falling Leaves | Leaves drift down from trees. Cheap and lovely. |
| Better Clouds | Proper volumetric clouds. Some GPU cost, and it argues with shaders that draw their own. |
| Chat Heads | Player face beside each chat line. Handy on a busy server. |
| AppleSkin | Hunger and saturation readout on the HUD. |
| BetterF3 | A readable, configurable debug screen. |
| Distant Horizons | Terrain far past your render distance, sent by the server itself. Big enough to have its own section above. |
Skip JEI and REI here. They load, but recipes now live server-side and the fix mod that used to patch that has no 26.2 build, so you get a mostly-empty recipe list and assume something is broken.
| Outdated client/server | Your client is older than 1.21.2, which is the oldest version the server accepts. You want the 26.2 build of Fabulously Optimized, which is currently on the beta channel. This is by far the most common problem. |
| Crash on startup | Almost always a duplicate or wrong-version mod. Open the instance's Content tab, disable whatever you added last, and launch again. |
| Black screen with a shader | That shader has no 26.2 build. Press Escape, Options > Video Settings > Shader Packs, and switch back to none. |
| Very low FPS | Turn shaders off first, then drop render distance to 8. If it is still bad, raise allocated memory to 6 GB. |
| Stutter for the first minute | Normal. That is chunk loading and shader compilation. It settles. |
| Distant Horizons shows nothing | Check you are in the main survival world - the Nether, the End and the resource world have it off on purpose. Then check you are on a 3.1 or 3.2 build of the mod, and give it a few minutes; the first sync is slow. |
| A mod does nothing at all | It probably needs a server-side counterpart. See the rule box in the Adding your own mods section. |
| Modrinth App will not start | Prism Launcher installs the same modpack from the same .mrpack file, and every step in this guide still applies - only the button names change. |
Still stuck? Ask in the Discord support channel and say which Minecraft version you are on, which Fabulously Optimized build, and what you added last. Those three answers solve most of it before staff even reply.