What is Fabric?
Fabric is a lightweight, modular modding toolchain for Minecraft, first released in 2018. It's designed for fast updates and performance — Fabric mods typically support new Minecraft versions on day one.
Why Fabric is popular
- Speed — the Fabric loader is small and fast. Servers start in seconds.
- Update cadence — Fabric usually updates to new Minecraft versions immediately, while Forge takes longer.
- Best performance mods — the most impressive Minecraft optimization mods (Sodium, Lithium, Starlight) are Fabric-first.
- Modular design — Fabric API is split into smaller modules so you only load what you need.
- Growing community — many big mods now release for Fabric alongside Forge.
What Fabric is best for
- Performance-focused players who want maximum FPS and minimum lag
- Players who want to run the latest Minecraft snapshot with mods
- Smaller mod setups (Fabric tends to have a more curated mod selection than Forge)
- Technical Minecraft players (most Carpet-style mods are Fabric)
Where Forge is still ahead
- Total mod count — Forge has more total mods, especially older ones
- Massive content modpacks like RLCraft and ATM are still mostly Forge
- Many "tech" mods (Mekanism, Thermal, IC2) originated on Forge
See our Fabric vs Forge comparison for the full breakdown.
Famous Fabric mods
- Sodium — The most impactful client performance mod ever made. 2–4× FPS improvement.
- Lithium — Server-side performance optimizations. Free TPS boost.
- Starlight — Lighting engine rewrite. Huge improvement to chunk loading.
- Iris — Shaders for Sodium users.
- Carpet — Technical Minecraft tools and tweaks.
- Create (Fabric port) — The Create mod, available on Fabric for newer versions.