Capabilities and Limits

Capabilities and Limits

What Cascade can and cannot do, in one place. Everything not listed here works the same everywhere.

Loader support

Both loaders run the same core, and every feature behaves identically on NeoForge and Fabric with one exception:

Feature	NeoForge	Fabric
Particles, beams, domes, light, SDF volumes, sequencing, JSON effects	yes	yes
Soft particles, lit particles, mesh/block/item debris	yes	yes
Bloom, GPU backend, HUD particles	yes	yes
Camera shake (Vfx.shake, VfxSequence.shake)	yes	no

On Fabric the shake payload is accepted and ignored, so sequences that include a shake still run correctly; players just feel no kick. Fabric exposes no camera-angles hook and Cascade ships no mixins, so this stays until Fabric API grows one.

Per-feature limits

Billboarded particles

• soft() applies to alpha-blended billboards only. Additive billboards, trails, and meshes ignore it.
• stretch(...) is billboard-only; mesh particles tumble instead.
• Soft particles fade over a fixed 1.5 blocks; the distance is not per-effect.

Mesh, block, and item particles

• Cube and shard meshes are opaque: per-particle alpha is ignored, so fade them by size.
• Meshes only visibly rotate with spin(...); without it the tumble is invisible.
• Block debris uses the block's default state, untinted (grass and leaves read gray), drawn cutout (translucent blocks like glass look wrong), and always takes scene light.
• Item debris uses the ground-context model with item tints, but no enchantment glint.

GPU backend

Off by default; GpuSim.setEnabled(true) opts a client in. Only specs the GPU can mirror exactly run there, everything else silently uses the CPU simulation (which caps a system at 4000 particles):

• burst emission, additive blend, plain billboards - no mesh, lit, soft, or stretch
• no trails, sub-emitters, or collision
• at most 8 forces, all of gravity / drag / attractor / vortex, and at most 8 color stops
• the particle density option is ignored on the GPU path

Any GPU error logs once and drops the session back to the CPU path.

SDF volumes

• 1 to 8 shapes per volume.
• Walking the camera inside a volume's bounding sphere can clip it against the near plane.

HUD particles (ScreenVfx)

• Of the render spec, only blend, sprite, and flipbook animation apply; stretch, lit, soft, and mesh are world features and are ignored.
• Sub-emitter spawns are dropped; the HUD keeps one flat list, capped at 64 systems.
• Positions and sizes are gui-scaled units. Screen y grows downward.
• A ring shape samples the xz plane and flattens to a line on the HUD; use a sphere shell for a round burst.

Bloom

Off by default; PostFx.setEnabled(true) opts a client in. Only Cascade's own effects feed the bloom capture, so the sun, lamps, and other mods' rendering never glow. A broken post chain logs once and disables itself.

Sequencing and spawning

• Sub-emitters nest at most 4 deep; deeper specs stop spawning children.
• Effects beyond 96 blocks from the camera do not draw (they still tick).
• A frame budget of 60000 primitives draws nearest-first under heavy load and drops the far tail.