Status: ALPHA — playable on Apple Silicon, under active development.
A fork of Voxy (the LOD rendering mod for Minecraft) ported to run on Apple M-series GPUs. Upstream Voxy requires OpenGL 4.6; macOS ships a frozen OpenGL 4.1, so this fork runs Voxy's entire LOD renderer on Metal while Minecraft itself keeps rendering on GL, and bridges the two worlds every frame through an IOSurface.
Verified on an Apple M4 at ~110 FPS with 32-chunk render distance and LOD terrain to the horizon.
Requirements: macOS on Apple Silicon, JDK 21+, this repository.
VOXY_FORCE_METAL=1 ./gradlew runClientVOXY_FORCE_METAL=1 is the explicit opt-in for the Metal render path —
without it Voxy disables itself on macOS and you get plain Sodium rendering.
To use the mod in a launcher profile, build the jar and drop it in mods/
together with the matching Sodium version:
./gradlew build # output: build/libs/voxy-<version>.jar| Component | Version |
|---|---|
| Minecraft | 1.21.11 |
| Fabric Loader | 0.18.2+ |
| Fabric API | 0.140.0+ |
| Sodium (required) | mc1.21.11-0.8.1 |
- LOD terrain to the horizon with real baked block textures, biome tinting, Minecraft lighting, and fog parity with Sodium's near terrain
- Translucent, animated water with correct underwater behavior (fog murk, no X-ray, stable visuals while swimming)
- Correct LOD↔terrain boundary (chunk-bound depth masking)
- Spyglass / zoomed FOV, screenshots, render-distance changes
- ~110 FPS on an M4 (synchronous GPU model — more headroom planned)
- LOD water animation phase can be slightly offset from MC's water, and flowing water (rivers/waterfalls seen up close) uses a static frame — accepted open issue.
- SSAO is not ported (an interim brightness compensation matches LOD terrain to Sodium's ambient-occlusion look).
- Sky at the horizon is the fog color rather than MC's real sky, and white clouds can be hard to see against it at day (MC 1.21.11 renders the sky in a way the compositor cannot yet preserve).
- Performance phase 2 pending: the Metal frame currently uses 3 synchronous GPU waits; collapsing them should push FPS well past the current ~110.
- Iris shader packs do not apply to LOD terrain (Voxy's Iris integration is OpenGL-only by design); Iris-alongside-Voxy compatibility on macOS is being tested.
docs/METAL-MIGRATION.md— architecture, the root-cause/fix table, the full environment-variable reference, backlog.docs/MIGRATION-HISTORY.md— the complete journey: every milestone, bug, root cause, and fix that got this working.docs/DEVELOPMENT.md— building, running, debugging workflow, log markers, and contribution conventions.docs/LOD-FLICKER-INVESTIGATION.md— historical investigation notes (May 2026).
- MCRcortex — Voxy, the upstream mod this fork builds on.
- Port and stabilization work: see
docs/MIGRATION-HISTORY.md.