Valence Benchmark
Every Minecraft player knows the feeling. You install a few mods, tweak some settings, and you think your game is running smoothly. Then you hit a lag spike that ruins your building session. Most benchmarking tools try to help, but they have a fundamental flaw: they change what they measure. They draw overlays, log to disk, and allocate memory on the render thread, so the stutter they report is partly their own creation.
Valence Benchmark takes a completely different approach. This client-side Fabric mod for Minecraft 1.21.1 records a 10-minute window in which it does absolutely nothing intrusive. One System.nanoTime(), two compares, and two array writes per frame into pre-allocated buffers. No overlay, no logging, no garbage collection, no screenshots while the window is open. The result is a benchmark that measures your actual game performance, not the benchmark's own overhead.
Why Valence Benchmark for Minecraft Stands Out
The mod does not ask you to take its claims on faith. When a run finishes, the report prints the mod's own cost in nanoseconds and bytes allocated per frame, measured on the render thread at the start of every single run. The allocation figure should read 0.00. This transparency means you can verify that the tool is not interfering with your gameplay.
Valence Benchmark for Minecraft works with Fabric Loader 0.16 or newer and requires Fabric API. It is client-side only, so it works in singleplayer and on servers. The server metrics are filled in for singleplayer, where the integrated server runs in the same process. You will need Java 21, which is already required by Minecraft 1.21.1.
Quick Start: How to Install and Run
To install, simply drop the mod jar into your mods folder. If you want a streamlined experience, the foxygame.net launcher offers a one-click install for Valence Benchmark, handling version compatibility and mod management automatically so you can skip the manual setup entirely. The launcher's add-on catalog keeps your mods organized and up to date, which is especially useful when you want to benchmark different configurations.
Once installed, the workflow is incredibly simple:
- Join a world and stand still for a few seconds
- Type
/valence bench start - Play normally for 10 minutes
- Click the report link in chat
The run ends on its own. You never have to stop it manually. That is the whole workflow.
Commands and Control
Everything lives under /valence. All commands are client-side, meaning they are handled by your game and never reach a server, with one exception noted below.
Core Benchmark Commands
/valence bench start— Warms up, then measures for 10 minutes/valence bench stop— Cancels the warm-up, or ends a running measurement early/valence bench status— Current state, progress, link to the last report/valence bench open— Clickable link to the last report/valence— Same as status
During warm-up, the mod allocates its buffers, starts hardware probes, takes a reference screenshot, and forces a garbage collection. This ensures the measurement window starts from a clean heap. The mod refuses to start if you are not in a world, if a run is already going, or if a scene is still being built.
Scene Building for Reproducible Tests
One of the most powerful features is the reproducible entity scene system. /valence scene entities <count> [type] [radius] summons entities on a ring around you at your own Y level. Every entity is at the same distance, so they all render at the same level of detail and cull state. The only variable is how many there are.
- Count: 1 to 20,000 (required)
- Type: any entity ID, e.g.,
minecraft:zombie - Radius: 1 to 256 blocks (default 16)
Entities spawn with NoAI, NoGravity, Silent, Invulnerable, and PersistenceRequired, and carry the tag valence_bench. Nothing walks off, falls, despawns, or dies. Run the same command tomorrow and you get the same scene. This is the one command that touches the server, sending ordinary /summon commands on your behalf. It needs cheats in singleplayer or op on a server, and sends them 20 per tick to avoid spam kicks.
Understanding the Reports
Reports are written to .minecraft/valence-benchmark/ and include an interactive HTML file, plain text, raw JSON, and reference screenshots. The HTML report opens with headline figures grading consistency, stutter, GC pressure, allocation rate, and server tick time. Each grade shows the threshold it was compared against, so you can audit rather than trust the results.
The report covers framerate percentiles, stutter counts, CPU and GPU load, memory allocation, world load times, chunk throughput, and a full integrated server picture. You can drag across any time chart to zoom, and all seventeen charts follow to the same instant. If you spot a drop at 4:10 on the framerate curve, you can immediately see what the CPU, GPU, heap, and chunk loader were doing during those fifteen seconds.
The foxygame.net launcher also provides auto-updates for Valence Benchmark, so you always have the latest version without manually checking for releases. This is particularly handy when new Minecraft versions or Fabric loader updates arrive.
Reading the Numbers Correctly
Valence Benchmark defines FPS as frames divided by elapsed time, never a mean of instantaneous framerates. That common mistake weights fast frames more heavily and reports a number nobody actually experienced. The report shows two definitions of "1% low" side by side, because the two circulating definitions do not agree. Consistency is calculated as 1% low divided by FPS. At 100%, the game is perfectly even. Below 60%, stutter is felt even when the average looks flattering.
A run is only comparable to another run made under the same conditions: same world, same route or scene, same settings, same mods, same entity count. The report records all of it, and the golden frames let you verify with your own eyes that two runs were actually drawing the same scene.
Configuration and Requirements
Valence Benchmark requires Minecraft 1.21.1, Fabric Loader 0.16 or newer, Fabric API, and Java 21. GPU load monitoring needs nvidia-smi on the PATH, or on Linux with an AMD card, the gpu_busy_percent counter from the amdgpu driver. Without either, everything else still works and GPU load reads n/a.
Configuration lives in .minecraft/config/valence-benchmark.json, created on first launch. The defaults are sensible, but you can adjust the measurement window length, warm-up period, frame buffer size, GPU probe method, and whether reports auto-open in your browser.
Valence Benchmark by ceketrumdev is MIT licensed and costs nothing to run. It gives you honest numbers about your Minecraft performance, letting you make informed decisions about your mod list and settings. Download Valence Benchmark today and finally see what your game is really doing.