Far View

Added

Far mobs (option). Animals and villagers no longer vanish about 70 blocks away. You can see them out to your render distance. Past 128 blocks each one becomes a tiny picture of its own model, so a herd on a far hill still looks like cows and costs almost no fps. In singleplayer the game also sends mobs that far; on a server you see as far as the server sends them. Scopes and the spyglass work too: what you zoom in on stays a full model. Off by default; turn it on with farMobs.enabled in the config.

Detail by screen size. Distant terrain picks its detail from how big a block looks on your screen, instead of a fixed distance. Close hills stay sharp, and far ground you can barely see costs almost nothing. On by default.

Corner shading. Distant cliffs and valley floors get soft shadows where walls meet the ground, like vanilla's smooth lighting. Hills no longer look flat from far away. On by default, and gentler under a shader pack.

Smooth biome borders (option). Grass, leaf and water colours can fade across a biome edge instead of stepping in squares. Off by default; turn it on with biomeBlend in the config.

Merge flat faces (option). Distant water can be drawn with fewer, bigger pieces: same picture, less video memory. Off by default; mergeFlatFaces in the config.

Sodium settings page on NeoForge. On 1.21.1, 1.21.3 and 1.21.4, FarView's options now show up in Sodium's video settings, the same way they do in Embeddium on Forge.

Fixed

1.21.3 and 1.21.4 crashed on startup. The game closed while loading with FarView installed. Both versions load again.

Walls at the edge of the loaded world. Tall blue, grey or green walls could stand where the distance meets the normal chunks. They showed through water, over lower ground and between trees. They're gone.

Sky showing through distant forests. Jungle, dark oak, acacia, cherry and big oak forests had patches of sky visible through their floors. The ground under them is solid now.

Grey pillars on lake shores. A tall grey column could stand on a hillside next to a lake. It's a natural slope with grass and dirt again.

Deep square pits in the distance. Missing chunks could leave pits in the far ground. They're filled in now on every version, not just on NeoForge.

Grass glowed under shader packs. With a pack loaded, distant grass came out much brighter than the dirt, stone and sand next to it. Every block is now lit evenly and matches the ground near you.

Water, ice and cherry leaves had the wrong look. Distant water and ice were drawn with stone's texture, and cherry trees were half as bright as they should be. Each now uses its own texture and colour, and distant lakes match the water in front of you.

Snowy ground showed green. Snow-covered grass, podzol and mycelium were drawn in their bare colours from far away. They're white now.

Notes

The shader brightness setting was renamed. packBrightness is now packExposure, with a new default of 1.0 that matches the near ground. If you had changed the old setting, start from the new default.

The old look is one switch away. Detail by screen size and corner shading each have their own option (tierByScreenSize, cornerShading) if you prefer the 0.1.6 look.