Metalith

Nether

• Fixed the "curtains" in distant terrain: ledges and floating islands are no longer drawn as solid walls or pillars reaching down to the lava sea. This applies to both the first, approximate terrain and the exact terrain that replaces it.
• Lava falls and lava spilling over ledge edges no longer join ledges to the lava sea. A lava pool on a ledge no longer turns the whole ledge into lava.
• Stacked ledges, crimson and warped islands, and fungi now float the way they do in the real world.
• The Nether ceiling now continues into the distant terrain, glowstone included. It is hidden while you stand on top of the roof.
• Distant lava is marked as emissive for shader packs, so it glows instead of rendering like water.

Distant terrain (all dimensions)

• Each column can now hold up to four layers. Tree canopies show the ground beneath them instead of solid leaf pillars, and overhangs and arches stay open.
• Fixed cliffs and tall walls at tile borders that floated in the sky with a gap underneath.
• Caves filled in at a distance take the colour of the surrounding hillside, so grassy hills and terracotta cliffs no longer get grey stone steps.

Servers without Metalith

• Distant terrain you have already seen is no longer lost if the game crashes or the disk fills up. Damaged cache files are set aside instead of overwritten.
• Areas you have not visited yet no longer hide detail you have already seen.

Servers with Metalith

• Distant-terrain services now start off the server thread, which removes a one-time lag spike when a dimension is first opened.
• Nether and End terrain generation allocates less memory.

Upgrade notes

• Nether and End distant terrain is rebuilt once after updating. Overworld caches are kept, so nothing there is generated again.
• New network protocol (4): server-sent distant terrain needs this build on both client and server. With an older build on either side, the client builds distant terrain by itself.
• Multi-layer columns cost a little performance: about 0.3 ms of GPU time per frame, or roughly 2% FPS with a shader pack, in our tests.