Motivation
A personal friend requested a utility tool to improve load times for Minecraft installations with substantial mod collections.
Warm the operating system file cache for modded Minecraft so repeat starts feel faster. The GUI finds CurseForge and Prism instances, warms selected packs, shows progress, and can open Prism after the warm.
- Auto discovery of common CurseForge and Prism instance folders on Windows and macOS
- Warm selected instances by reading jars, zips, assets, and configs to prime the OS page cache
- Progress bar and live log
- Dry run mode that lists planned reads
- Optional launch of Prism after warm using a command template with
{instance} - Buttons to detect CurseForge, open CurseForge, and reveal the selected instance folder
- Install Python 3 if needed
- Open PowerShell in the repo folder
- Run powershell
python minecraft_gui.py
/opt/homebrew/bin/python3.12 minecraft_gui.py
Operating systems keep recently read data in memory.
By reading mod jars, assets, and config files in advance, the next game start avoids many disk seeks.
| Machine | Storage | Instance size | Java | T0 to Menu cold | T0 to Menu warm | Delta | Delta percent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Desktop 1 | NVMe | 8.2 GB mods | Temurin 21 | 90.0 s | 20.0 s | 70.0 s | 77.8% |
| Laptop 1 | SATA SSD | 8.2 GB mods | Temurin 21 | 160.0 s | 40.0 s | 120.0 s | 75.0% |
Q: Why do my results vary?
A: JVM warmup, concurrent downloads, and background processes introduce variance. Use multiple trials and report medians.
Q: Does this help after I already launched once?
A: Usually the second launch is already warm. The tool is useful after a reboot or when switching large packs.
Q: Does this reduce total memory for the game?
A: The OS can evict cache pages under pressure. If you run low on RAM it will drop old cache before it starves the game.