Don't worry, Cushions in Minecraft have "almost no impact" on frame rates
Mojang recently added a seemingly unassuming new item to Minecraft: the Cushion. They can be placed on surfaces at various heights, snap to the position of the supporting surface, and come in all 16 wool colors. Players have already used them to create chairs, dance floors, high-speed railways, and even complex contraptions; some have even used them to recreate kebabs.
However, Cushions are not standard blocks—they are entities. Whenever entities are mentioned, many players naturally associate them with the frame drops that occur when large numbers of minecarts, boats, or item frames are gathered together.
X user Daniel Prantolov conducted a stress test to investigate this: he placed over 2,000 Cushions across nine chunks in a superflat world—2,304 to be exact. The results showed that the game's frame rate dropped from 450 FPS to 427 FPS, a negligible difference.
Of course, this test does not represent all devices. Prantolov used a PC equipped with an RTX 3060; older hardware, low-end PCs, or devices like the Nintendo Switch might not perform the same way with the same number of Cushions. If you continue to stack Cushions in a save file already filled with large numbers of mobs, redstone contraptions, and multiplayer activity, the results could also differ.
Cushions are not like minecarts or boats, which constantly calculate movement, gravity, and collisions. According to Prantolov, Cushions check if the block supporting them has been destroyed approximately every 100 game ticks, or about once every five seconds. Therefore, their inherent computational load is relatively limited.
Official documentation states that Cushions can be placed on any flat surface; they align to the grid horizontally and snap to the supporting surface vertically. They do not move and will be destroyed if the supporting block beneath them is removed. Cushions have no collision box and can overlap with other objects, though they cannot overlap with another Cushion.
Will adding Cushions to an existing base cause lag?
Cramming 2,304 Cushions into a small area is certainly not something an average survival player would do. However, the versatility of Cushions is high; builders have already begun using them to decorate hillsides, create more textured flooring, and combine them into bookshelves, pillars, interior floors, and various detailed structures.
It is highly likely that, much like armor stands and item frames, they will gradually become a staple decorative tool for builders. Because of this, players' concerns about performance issues if the quantity gets out of control are not unfounded.
If your base is already packed with automatic sorting systems, mob farms, redstone machines, chests, and other entities, adding more Cushions could certainly make lag more noticeable. However, Prantolov believes that what truly slows down the game is often the complex systems already present in the base, and Cushions are, at most, a minor additional burden.
He noted that the performance impact of a single chest (block entity) is significantly greater than that of a single Cushion entity; in his survival save, the game is almost unplayable without chest optimization mods. For the average player who only places a few Cushions in their house, there is currently no need to worry about frame rate issues.
