is it recommended to read from the off-site version for added footnotes

Introduction: The New DJSng Blog

Hey look, it's the first ever post on my new blog website! I would have kept using Zonelets, but the RSS support kind of sucks, so...

Just a quick mention that I'm using Bear Blog now! They have an ATOM feed, that while does not preserve the original publication date, lets me show off the history of all of my blog posts! The RSS happily seems to work, and possibly also sort of preserving the publication dates, but it's only the first few entries. That's completely fair, I used ZoneRSS and after my feed reached maybe a couple of thousand kilobytes, it just gave up entirely trying to work. Oh well, we have a solution, and it might be off platform, it's great!
And plus, for the SpaceHey readers, I can still mirror my blog to you guys just fine. Hello, all of my friends!!! Are you subscribed? I'm curious!

Very quick disclaimer that this post is not talking about the Kelogg cereal, as funny as that would be. This is about the modding application by (who I think is named) Kaldaien.

Hell: A Love / Hate Relationship

Right, the post. Thanks, titlecard.
If you're unaware: Minecraft modding is hell. You probably need some context before we talk about Special K.

From my very basic understanding to crash logs, to performance mods all being split up willy nilly, right to all the incompatibility, hellscapes, the various clients that claim to be mod compatible but aren't, the beginners who stick with these clients because of their convenience, the modders like myself who are either on a high horse or wanting to bank on a new investment...

It's not a surprise it's hell. Like, it's not a surprise at all, but that's what comes with experience. Of course, when you remember that Mod Z and Mod Q are incompatible, you get magic, and sometimes that magic is much better than something like Lunar Client.

Love - A Drug

Take for example, my friend Rosalynn. Of course, some people can't easily try new things and need either a lot of help, somebody to set it up for them, or even every feature they used re-added. So, after a while of thinking about it, one night I convinced them with all my heart that I wouldn't download all of their bank details after we installed an alternative for Teamviewer, I set up their first modding launcher, set up their first modded instance, set up their first vanilla instance...

And one two three, bam, we're done. After installing some resource packs and shaders, making sure the shaders do not microwave the CPU, and waiting a while for a glass connector mod that hadn't yet updated to the version I based the instance on, it was all set up. She got to experience the fun of Jade (WAILA fork), Xaero's Minimaps (and waypoints! :D), the Origins mod, browsing shader packs in-game, Sodium's benefits over OptiFine, and all of the other beautiful advancements made in the performance section of the Minecraft community.

And well, that was only made pretty because of Mods. And even though Lunar tried to take the spotlight, there was still plenty of mods that Lunar couldn't impliment even if they tried to appeal to me. Stuff like Jade, waypoints, fullbright, Sodium, Zoomify, ViaFabricPlus (an amazing multiconnect fork), Freecam, and so many more opened doors... Lunar might be able to do it some way or another, but the mods will always do it with less bloat on the client. And that's what matters. The best experience possible.

And through Rosalynn's wonderful patience, I opened the door to show her all the new cool things to come through. And together, that night, we tried so much crazy bullshit. And we were happy, making memories, like all good friends do.

Sorry, got a little caught up there. Point is, modding's good. As much as I hate it, I can't do anything without it, and that's the love part of my love-hate relationship with mods.

However...

Hate - A Motivator

The devil exists! How delightful.

Modding is also a switchblade. It plays nice when you use the right cards, but sometimes you play a card a little too early, and it's a kick in the weak point. Whether that be emotional damage, or something a bit more extreme. Like, "losing dark souls again for the millionth time" extreme.

1.12, if you haven't tried it before, is a nightmare to optimize. Of course, 1.12 was released in 2017 and that was around during the last time that OptiFine was effective, so you could probably still survive off OptiFine. but for somebody like myself who want to get a tiny bit more out of everything, there's quite literally a mod named LoliASM (which had to be censored when it went to Curseforge) among all things, Cullers, OptiFine, a bunch of other stuff... And then you add everything and realize the amount of incompatibilities just fucks with your brain.

I don't think it will be an issue for most since you most likely only use OptiFine anyway, so nothing changes for the majority, but for those few nuts, that sucks, because you want to get the most out of Minecraft, and you can't D:
Because everything FUCKING CONFLICTS!!!

Come in, Special K!

Ah, there's our star.
History lesson, time!

Special K (seemingly named after the main developer Kaldaien) is a mod that started as a mod for Batman: Arkham Knight and Fallout 4 of a few small games to tweak and fix their poor state of performance. It later became known as a mod for NieR: Automata in 2017 (which I know nothing about), and by 2020, spread out to a lot of games. A few Minecraft: Java Edition Java args guides recommend Special-K due to a feature called "OpenGL-IK", which is a OpenGL to DirectX11 wrapper.
Don't get it?

A Quick Explanation of a "wrapper", the difference between OGL and DX11, etc

That probably flew over your head, because it seems that a small portion of people who I show my blogs have no idea how anything works. No problem, let's simplify!

A "wrapper" is a type of mod or tweak that wraps (haha, get it) around a program to change how a part of it works or starts. Steam is, technically, a wrapper for games that lets you use Steam to invite friends and invite people to your game.

A "graphics api wrapper", which is what OpenGL-IK is, is pretty much the same thing. OpenGL-IK is like a translation. You can't speak French, right? You need a translator to hear the french (their first language) to tell it to you in English (their second language). Graphics wrappers work that way, it takes all of the OpenGL features and turns it into DirectX11 features, which sometimes lets programs that require DirectX11 (such as shaders) to work properly.

Well, that sounds amazing! How does that relate to minecraft?

If only it worked

Yeah, exactly.

Special K and Minecraft have... Well, literally zero documentation. Here's a display of what appears on the google search for "SpecialK Minecraft":

Wow. That's not cool at all! The only documentation that exists is some guide that doesn't even answer any questions!
Well... Yeah. Because it's probably not even tested.

Minecraft is a hard game to run, especially if you don't play Bedrock. Java runs on... Well, Java. and Java is meant to run for many programs, not just Minecraft! So, when it comes to injecting Special K, it might just inject into something it shouldn't. And well, chaos ensue. Makes sense that nobody tests Java edition!

Of course, you could try to run anyway, and

It was always busted

Are you fucking serious?

Let's go back in time. That guide I linked before wasn't the first time Special K was proposed for Java! I had tried it in 2022 and didn't work, why else would I be bringing that up? I tried in 2024, it didn't work, and I think I had some kind of episode, because apparently the day after Feburary 2nd, where something allegedly happened when I tried to talk it out with one of my family siblings that had been there for the incident.

Of course, using SpecialK on a Java executable was probably a terrible idea, considering there was bound to be many issues. It's a dependancy, not the game engine, so... Volia, magic issues from nowhere.
There is also the consideration that Special K is, well... A fucking NieR mod. It was probably not going to play fair anyway.

There is more complications

Of course, it probably also wasn't just that. I run Rivertuna Statistic Servers, an addon for MSI Afterburner that shows off the funny CPU Usage and temperature overlays you see in a lot of benchmark videos. I specifically only installed this on Ultrakill and Minecraft, because ROBLOX has an anti-cheat and anything else is probably not getting played any time soon. That's quite fine for me, I think.

But RTSS is infamously buggy with Minecraft. It "works", sure, but if you use an old version of Minecraft where you need Sodium, it gets pretty ugly. Lots of things can go wrong, and since RTSS hooks into game, it doesn't just fuck with Anti-Cheats. And Minecraft happened to be one of these things, unfortunately.

Let's also consider that I'm a modder, which means, well... modding. I've used Windhawk in the past (when my main rig used Revert8Plus), I've used ExplorerPatcher in the past (windows 10 taskbar for windows 11 & windows 10 taskbar tweaks in general), my system is tweaked out with so many (debatably to some professionals) unrecommended and unnecessary tweaks that probably are doing more harm than good, etc. There's many possible faults, and you can't really throw a dart and find the one spot where we failed. It could be almost anything.

My last install

Okay, getting back on track, I tried to install it yesterday. Let's go through what happened, step by step:

Day one (Install):

• Installed Special-K
• Installed Special-K kernel driver for CPU Thermals
• Set up with Minecraft, tweak some settings
• Minecraft no longer appears on the taskbar
• Minecraft now sometimes doesn't close until force killed
• Tweak with settings A LOT following these issues:
• Window issues (When maximized game is fine, but once window res is changed, the window has black borders and all clicks are offset weirdly, it's hard to explain)
• Randomly fixed window issues
• OSD does not display CPU temperature
• SpecialK runs several times over itself

Day two (Uninstall):

• Window issues again
• Menu no longer opened
• Playing in-game is pleasant
• Fucked up CPU usage that isn't right? (maxxed out, very bad on fans)
• Google results not helpful

Yeah...

Special K on Minecraft is horrible.

It's just so poorly tested and documented, I don't even know what could have went wrong. I could tweak settings hopefully and hope clicking SOMETHING helps, but considering Special K has so many issues with Minecraft, it's not worth it. We'll use just use Minecraft's in-game framerate limiter for now!

Maybe one day, some better parity. But for now, the guide lied to me, we'll keep rocking RTSS and Sodium's OpenGL-based engine. VulkanMod is getting some progress on Vulkan performance, but it's still got a long way to perfection, and it's incompatible with Sodium, so... We'll wait for now, I think!