Decimate — far-terrain LOD for Sodium (BETA)

Decimate draws distant terrain beyond your render distance, so you can see mountains, forests and lakes far past your normal view while keeping a low render distance. It is built to be light: it runs well on an Intel HD 620 laptop, and it is completely standalone — it does not use or require Distant Horizons.

Features

• Far terrain with no fog wall. Vanilla terrain meets the LOD at a plain edge, with no fog band in clear air.
• Matches the world. The LOD follows the time of day, rain and thunder, and fades underwater, in lava and with blindness like normal terrain. Snowy trees, forests, water and sand have their own colours.
• Solid-looking terrain. Cliffs, trees and buildings are drawn with walls, not just flat sheets.
• Fast and small. Distant areas switch to a simpler mesh, off-screen areas are skipped, and the height data uses only about 17 MB of native memory.
• Fills itself in (singleplayer). The integrated server quietly generates chunks beyond your view distance, nearest first, so the LOD covers ground you haven't visited.
• Works in tall custom worlds, such as 1:1 scale maps with a modified world height.

Settings

There is no settings menu in this beta. It runs with fixed defaults: a 64-chunk LOD radius, simpler meshes beyond 320 blocks, and the singleplayer chunk generator on at a gentle pace. An in-game settings screen (radius, detail distance, generator on/off and speed) is planned for a later update.

Requirements

• Minecraft 26.1.2, Fabric Loader 0.18+
• Fabric API
• Java 25
• Sodium (recommended — it is the only renderer tested)
• Client-side only. Do not install it on a server.

Tested on

Windows 11, Intel HD Graphics 620 (OpenGL 3.3), Sodium 0.9.2, Fabric API 0.155.3. NVIDIA, AMD, macOS and Linux are untested — reports are welcome.

Things you should know

• Your world folder grows. In singleplayer, the mod makes the integrated server generate chunks around you (like pregenerating). Back up worlds you care about, (a setting to turn the generator off is planned).
• CPU use. The generator and the mesher run in the background and pause when the game is busy. If you notice stutter while exploring new ground, please report it — a speed setting is planned.
• Overworld only. The Nether and End are not drawn.
• On multiplayer servers the LOD only shows chunks your client has loaded, because the server-side generator needs the integrated server.

Known limitations (beta)

• Water is drawn opaque.
• Grass and leaves use one colour, not biome tints.
• Block changes far away are not shown until that area is reloaded.
• The LOD is a height-map: no caves or overhangs.
• The radius is fixed at 64 chunks, and nothing is configurable yet.

Compatibility

• Distant Horizons: not compatible; the two mods overlap. Use one or the other.
• Shader packs (Iris): not supported; only tested with shaders off.
• Other fog mods: Decimate changes the game's fog values (at a priority above Sodium's). Mods that also edit fog may conflict.