Farfield

Far-distance terrain rendering for Minecraft, using levels of detail (LOD): render hundreds to thousands of chunks at a low cost, seamlessly.

What to expect :

• Terrain beyond the vanilla distance, 256 to 512+ chunks, user-selectable.
• Unexplored (not yet generated) terrain shown, even coarsely.
• A command that builds the LOD of everything already generated in an existing world, throttled so it can run at night without hurting the server.
• Any shader pack works without pack-specific configuration, as far as technically possible.
• Server streaming safe by default: only the visible surface is sent unless the operator enables more.
• Presets from light to ultra; no announced minimum hardware.
• Diagnostics built in: debug overlay lines at a fixed, always-visible place on every loader, dumps, a diagnostic bundle command.

What was considered when making this mod :

• Performance first: a GPU-driven renderer, compact data, no stutter. The mod must be cheap enough that players leave it on.
• Seamless: no visible line where vanilla terrain ends and LOD terrain begins, with or without shader packs.
• Small footprint: little RAM, VRAM and disk; the LOD of a world must cost a fraction of the world itself.
• Works everywhere: single player, small servers, and large public servers with a robust streaming protocol that never hurts gameplay.