Far View

Added

Distant trees now have trunks and real canopies. Until now a tree in the distance was a flat patch of leaf colour sitting on the ground, because the terrain memory only kept one block per column and for a tree that is always the leaves. It now remembers what is underneath as well, so a canopy has thickness, stands on a trunk, and has ground visible beneath it.

Distant hills cast shadows. Ridges now shade the valleys behind them, following the real sun as it moves through the day. Off automatically while a shader pack is loaded, since the pack does its own. Toggle: sunShadows.

The distance blends into your shader pack's sky. Previously the far haze always faded toward vanilla's horizon colour, so with a pack loaded the distance dissolved into a colour the sky above it never reached. It now matches whatever sky your pack is actually drawing — any pack, any of its settings, nothing to configure. Toggle: matchShaderSky.

A detail distance setting. detailDistance controls how far full detail reaches before cells start merging together. Merged cells are flat — no trunks, no block textures — so this is the setting that actually decides how good the distance looks, and how much it costs. Raise it for more, lower it for frames.

Fixed

Trees no longer smear down the hillsides they stand on. Every tree was painting a curtain of leaf texture from its top all the way down to the ground behind it. Most noticeable on slopes and in cherry groves.

No more holes under trees, or gaps at the edge of your render distance. Two separate places you could see straight through the world: beneath distant tree canopies, and in a ring where the loaded world handed over to the far view.

Distant hillsides show the ground under the grass. A slope drawn in steps used to paint the whole step with the block on top, so a grass step was a wall of lawn several blocks tall. Taller steps now show the dirt and stone actually under the turf.

Distant terrain is no longer dark under shader packs. Shader packs turn off Minecraft's own face shading and apply their own, but the far view was never getting either — so it sat dark and flat next to lit ground.

No more floating slabs of terrain on the horizon. The outermost edge of the remembered world was drawn as a thin plate, which from a distance looked like fragments hanging in the sky.

Distant terrain no longer blinks out when you turn with shaders on.

Smoother frame times while the far view builds. Building the distance could take most of a frame and then none of the next, which was felt as stutter even at high frame rates.

Far less log spam. The status line was written every five seconds no matter what; it now only appears when something changes.