Mercury - Quicksilver

Quicksilver is a performance modpack that attempts to be a stable base for most mods. This speeds up vanilla significantly, and will run on as low as 512mb of memory, and on lower end systems. (the name is a riff on the periodic table series of mods if you were curious :P)

How does this compare to Simply Optimized? Why Forge not Fabric?

Simply Optimized runs on Fabric instead of Forge, so they have access to a few mods that are unavailable for Forge and most likely will improve your performance compared to this pack. The caveat here is that while Fabric and Forge are catching up in terms of compatability, many mods are still Forge only, and as this modpack is supposed to be a base modpack with other mods added on top of it, Forge is a better option for this particular use case.

Why 1.19.2 and not 1.19.4?

This is for much the same reason that this modpack is on Forge not Fabric, most mods have chosen 1.19.2 as their version of choice, so this modpack is stuck on 1.19.2 for the time being. This is not only true for mods external to the pack though, many of the performance mods included are only for 1.19.2 as well.

Why not [Mod]?

• Smooth Boot? while on other systems it may significantly improve load times with my personal testing it only decreased them
• Phosphor (Radon)? Starlight is a better alternative and generally is seen as better.
• FixMySpawnR / Let Me Despawn? These mods change vanilla behavior quite a bit, and while they do increase performance, doing that at the cost of vanilla features is not a goal of this pack.
  • But Alternate Current? Alternate Current is a mod that changes the redstone engine of minecraft, and unfortunately that can break some very rare redstone. It mainly will break location specific redstone, some 0-tick designs, and some tnt-dupers. I feel the trade off is worth it in this case, as it doesn't break features that are used commonly in vanilla, only by high level redstoners like those on SciCraft or similar servers, who are unlikely to use this pack regardless.
• Distant Horizons? While the idea behind this mod is very interesting, and I've had some success with the mod, it nearly nullifies the effects of Enhanced Block Entities and for me that is quite the deal breaker as modded minecraft is full of block entities, and therefore are really important to be optimized. I've left the mod's config in the pack if you would like to add it yourself, but know that it will not be supported.

Okay, that's cool and all but where are the numbers?

For me (see specs below), I get the following loadtimes (after the first load):
On 512mb: 2.67 to main menu, and 15.79 to world load
On 1gb: 2.50s to main menu, and 15.46 to world load

But that's just the pack by itself, what about with other mods? I added this modpack to ATM 8 and here are the results:
Default (without the pack): 2m 30s to get into the menu, and an out of memory crash when trying to generate a world
On the first load (with the pack): 2m15s to get into the menu, and 3m31s to world
On the second load (with the pack): 54s for menu, and  2m12s to world

Specs (as given by F3):

• 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz
• Mesa Intel(R) Xe Graphics (TGL GT2)

The modpack isn't performing well for me, why? Well are you:

• Using the "Fast" quality setting in video settings? I'm not quite sure why but this will cause significantly choppier framerates (especially under low memory conditions). Use "Fancy" instead it preforms much better in most circumstances.
• Using less than 1gb of ram? While yes, the modpack will perform quite well under 512mb, if you can spare it, one gigabyte of ram will make the modpack run incredibly smoothly.
• On your first load? Lightspeed seemingly decreases performance on your first load, but if on successive loads it will get much much faster.