Join our Discord server to get the latest updates, ask for support and make suggestions. Check out the gallery channel where you can share screenshots of your adventures and be inspired by other players.

AI Disclaimer: No generative AI was used to make art for this modpack. All pack-specific art, including the banner and logo, are entirely hand-made.

Attention!

This modpack uses Distant Horizons, an experimental and resource-intensive mod. We recommend you have at least 16GB RAM and allocate 10GB to Minecraft. More info in the FAQ section.

If your PC is struggling, you can disable Distant Horizons on the server and/or client and it's still the same great modpack!

The World of Beyond The Horizon

Long ago, the Overworld was home to ancient beings whose knowledge and power surpassed imagination. They grew magnificent organic towers that reached for the skies, serving as nodes of an advanced travel network. But one day, without warning, these ancient beings vanished, leaving their creations behind as monuments to a forgotten age.

Centuries passed in their absence. Adventurers, traders, and settlers from every dimension came to call the Overworld home, starting a new age of progress and prosperity. People from the Aether brought their celestial wonders, while the creatures of the Nether brought fire and magic. Even the cunning rats from Ratlantis emerged; hungry for innovation, they exchanged their precious coins for machines and tools, spreading their currency far and wide, and an economy was formed. Rumors still linger that within Ratlantis lie lost wonders of technology, waiting for a daring explorer to claim them.

Prosperity was fleeting. Tensions between the Aether and the Nether boiled over into a devastating war, with the Overworld caught in the middle. Great battles raged across the land, leaving old structures and historical sites as and scars of this conflict: abandoned fortresses, shattered weapons, and forgotten battlefields. The towers of the ancients, once symbols of unity and progress, became silent witnesses to this era of turmoil.

Now, the future of the Overworld lies in your hands. The land is alive with opportunities for discovery and adventure: uncover the secrets of the Ancients, scour Ratlantis for technological marvels, and explore the battlefields of the past in search of lost treasure. Wherever you roam, a Quest Book is available to guide you, offering tips and direction when needed.

In Beyond The Horizon, your path is yours to choose. Will you develop new technology, harness the power of magic, or embrace a nomadic lifestyle, traveling on horse or dragonback through a beautiful world full of history, lost riches, and potential?

Adventure is waiting! What will you find just beyond the horizon?

About

Beyond The Horizon (BTH) provides a new experience centered on exploration enhanced by technology and magic. It features a thoughtful selection of mods, all tested, customized and integrated to overhaul exploration in Minecraft, making it more immersive, rewarding and fun.

Here are some of the highlights:

☀️ Distant Horizons

True to its name, BTH is designed around Distant Horizons and its increased render distances. Structures are spaced farther apart to account for this, making mounts, vehicles and other travel methods central to the modpack.

Scout for interesting structures and terrain from hundreds of blocks away and set out on an adventure, all with minimal impact on performance!

🏔️ World Generation

With Tectonic handling terrain generation for the Overworld, the world features massive mountain ranges, deep oceans, and unique-looking terrain. Complemented by mods like Terralith, BTH offers diverse biomes to explore and build upon.

In addition to the Overworld, Nether, and End, this modpack includes Ratlantis and The Aether as extra dimensions. All dimensions have been heavily customized to suit the modpack's style and work beautifully with Distant Horizons.

Be prepared to take lots of screenshots during your travels!

🏰 Structures

BTH boasts a rich variety of high-quality structures across all dimensions, thanks to mods like Integrated Dungeons and Structures, Yung's Better series, and village mods such as ChoiceTheorem's Overhauled Village, Luki's Grand Capitals, and Towns and Towers.

We’ve also added exclusive custom structures designed by our team of experienced builders to fit the theme of the modpack and beautify the Overworld. Look out for lore bits, easter eggs and precious loot within them!

Building your own grandiose structures has never been easier, thanks to tools from Building Wands and Building Gadgets. Select from a rich palette of blocks and decorations with mods like Valhelsia Furniture, Immersive Furniture, Hearth and Home, Rechiseled and Building But Better.

✈️ Exploration

To complement the greater view distance and revamped world generation, we've included a variety of travel-focused mods, from upgraded horses to advanced land, water, and air vehicles. Small Ships offer a versatile upgrade from vanilla boats, while Immersive Aircraft and Dragon Mounts: Legacy let you take to the skies and explore the world from above.

Take your home with you! Using Nomadic Tents, you can set up camp and enjoy your bigger-on-the-inside portable base, where you can keep your farms, storage, machines, pets, and more! Once you're ready to get back on the road, just pick up the tent and everything within it will be safely kept inside.

End Remastered eyes needed to open the End portal can be found in structures spread across different biomes. Furthermore, some of the more powerful items in the game, like Drygmys and air vehicles, have custom recipes to encourage exploration.

Maps to interesting biomes and treasure can be found in structures or by fishing. This all culminates in an addicting gameplay loop of traveling, looting and upgrading.

🥫 Food and Health

Chefs and farmers will feel right at home in BTH! A new food system makes farming, cooking and prepping for adventure a lot more rewarding. Thanks to the mod Spice of Life: Valheim Updated, eating food now grants a buff of health and speed. Better food means longer-lasting and stronger effects.

To make the most of this new system, Farmer’s Delight and its addons introduce new ingredients, recipes and cooking utensils. Create: Slice and Dice makes it easier to automate cooking. You can also increase your base hearts by completing advancements; check the in-game Quest Book for details.

⚙️ Technology

BTH offers a hand-picked selection of technology mods, including Immersive Engineering, EnderIO, PneumaticCraft, Create and more. For FE power generation, EnderIO's Soul Engine features unique new fuel options exclusive to this pack, offering fun automation challenges.

The most industrious engineers can automate the generation of various valuable resources, as well as craft incredibly powerful tools, weapons and armor, giving them control over land, sea and sky.

🪄 Magic

The modpack features robust magic systems with mods like Botania, Ars Nouveau, Iron's Spells and Spellbooks, Forbidden & Arcanus, Eidolon: Repraised and more.

Magic is a powerful tool in combat and exploration, allowing you to deal damage, heal yourself and others, summon powerful allies, traverse the land and skies, and even teleport across vast distances. With a bit of creativity, magic can also be used to automate various tasks, from everyday chores to world-shaping feats.

⚔️ Combat

With Immersive Armors and Simply Swords, you’ll find diverse sets of weapons and armor that are not only visually impressive but also incredibly powerful. Craft and improve your tools and weapons to your liking using Tetra, prepare healing spells and potions and get ready for exciting and immersive combat encounters.

Challenge epic bosses from mods like Aquamirae, The Aether, Incendium, Mutant Monsters, The Graveyard, and Alex’s Caves, and earn precious loot to upgrade your arsenal!

🤝 Multiplayer

Adventuring with friends is always more fun! While BTH works great in singleplayer, it was designed with multiplayer in mind.

Impress your friends with stunning photos taken using the Exposure mod, beat them at boardgames with Table Top Craft, paint on a canvas with Joy of Painting, or form a band using Music Maker Mod and Etched, and sing along using proximity Voice Chat. You can even mail your artwork or anything else to other players with Mighty Mail.

Want to focus on adventuring rather than farming? Gather coins in your travels and trade resources with your friends using Lightman’s Currency. We configured the economy in the modpack to make it immersive and guarantee its viability even in large servers. Earn coins by exploring: the further away you are from the center of the world, the more coins you find in loot. With enough coins, you can open a portal to Ratlantis where you can find high tech loot brought there from the overworld by the rats.

Don’t have friends to play multiplayer with? You can always make your own friends with MineColonies!

Need a server to play with friends? Check out this list of Minecraft Hosting Providers.

Videos

FAQ

Q: What can I do in this modpack? Is there an end goal?

A: This is a sandbox modpack aimed at improving exploration in every aspect. There is no specific end goal, but if you’re feeling lost, check out the in-game Quest Book or the Advancements menu for inspiration. We have created some custom end-game items to reward players who progress in multiple mods, including Terminus (a sword for experienced interdimensional travelers) and NanoBot Soda (a food item with hours worth of health and speed buffs). There is also the unique and fun Plushie Challenge that is bound to keep collectors busy for many hours.

Q: Where is my hunger bar? Why do I start with 3 hearts? How do I get more?

A: BTH uses the mod Spice of Life: Valheim Updated to improve the hunger system and make it more rewarding to cook and eat interesting foods. If you’ve eaten no foods, you’ll be at your base hearts (3 at start), but any food you eat grants a buff of health and speed. Better food means longer-lasting and stronger buffs. You can also permanently increase your base hearts by completing advancements! Check the in-game Quest Book for details.

Q: What is Distant Horizons?

A: Distant Horizons (DH) is a Minecraft mod that extends the view distance of the game by rendering faraway terrain in a simplified, low-detail format often referred to as LODs (Level Of Detail). This allows players to see far beyond the normal render distance limit of Minecraft, improving the scale of the world without sacrificing performance. The version of DH included in this pack features multiplayer support: when playing on a server, the server will generate the LOD data in addition to the chunk data and send everything to the clients.

Q: My game keeps stuttering! / How do I increase my FPS?

A: When first joining a new world, it's normal to have some FPS drops which usually go away after a few minutes.

Beyond that, depending on what exactly is causing your performance issues, there are some things you can try that should get you results instantly:

Reduce shader quality profile—it goes as low as "Potato", while still being a significant improvement from vanilla Minecraft.
Disable shader shadows.
Reduce vanilla render distance (also improves TPS).
Reduce Distant Horizons render distance (also improves TPS).
Reduce Distant Horizons LOD quality
Disable shaders
As a last resort, disable DH LOD rendering by toggling "Enable Rendering" to False

If nothing seems to work, try asking for help in our Discord.

Q: How can I stop the game from lagging? / How can I improve TPS?

A: First of all, make sure you have allocated enough RAM to Minecraft to play BTH:

For systems with 16GB RAM. allocate 10GB to Minecraft. Make sure you have no other programs (such as a browser) running at the same time.
For systems with at least 24GB RAM, allocate 12GB to Minecraft.

When first joining a new world, it's normal to have some lag/rubberbanding which usually goes away after 30 minutes.

Beyond that, depending on what exactly is causing the lag, there are some things you can try:

Reduce vanilla render distance (also improves FPS).
Reduce Distant Horizons render distance (also improves FPS).
As a last resort, disable generation of distant chunks by toggling "Enable Distant Generation" to False.

In all situations, we highly recommend pregenerating the world whenever possible. See the next FAQ for more info.

Q: How can I pregenerate the world to reduce lag?

A: We highly recommend pre-generating the world for both servers and single player worlds. The most common cause of lag is generation of new chunks when first joining the world or travelling to new regions. By pre-generating, chunks load smoothly even when traveling at fast speeds.

A good world size to pre-generate is a radius of 512 chunks (8,192 blocks) for the overworld, or half of that for other dimensions. A fully pre-generated overworld will take up around 20GB of disk space, which includes region files and LOD data.

How to pre-generate chunks in single player:
- Start a new world.
- Go into creative mode or dig a hole in the ground so you're safe.
- Open the Distant Horizons (DH) settings menu: Pause menu > Options > The square button on the top left, next to the FOV slider.
- Set DH "LOD Chunk Rendering Distance Radius" to 512 chunks.
- Set DH" CPU Load" to 5. I paid for the whole CPU.
- Unpause and open the chat prompt with T (this prevents the game from pausing: there's a memory leak issue in Minecraft where leaving the game paused while rendering chunks will crash the game).
- When you're ready to play, set DH "CPU Load" to 1. Minimal impact and DH "LOD Chunk Rendering Distance Radius" to 80 chunks.
  - At this stage, you can optionally also set "Enable Distant Generation" to False, to avoid DH generating new faraway chunks as you travel close to the edge of the pregenerated world, preventing lag spikes while travelling.

How to pre-generate chunks in multiplayer:
- In the server console (or in-game as a server admin), type in the following command: /dh pregen start minecraft:overworld 0 0 512.
  - To pre-generate other dimensions, use the following commands:
    - /dh pregen start minecraft:the_nether 0 0 256
    - /dh pregen start minecraft:the_end 0 0 256
    - /dh pregen start aether:the_aether 0 0 256
    - /dh pregen start rats:ratlantis 0 0 256
For advanced server admins:
- DH won't generate chunks where LODs already exist, so if you trim the world, make sure you also delete the DH LOD data file (world/data/DistantHorizons.sqlite for the overworld) before starting another pre-generation.
- You can increase pre-generation speed by, for example, tweaking the number of threads used. When no players are online, type in the command /dh config common.threadPreset I_PAID_FOR_THE_WHOLE_CPU to maximise DH pre-generation speed. When you're ready to play, switch the preset back to Minimal Impact or whatever works best for your server.
- You can further increase pre-generation speed by installing C2ME. Because it's a Fabric mod, additional steps are needed:

Remove the mods Presence Footsteps and Hyperbox (incompatible with Sinytra Connector and C2ME) temporarily.
Add C2ME and Sinytra Connector.
Enjoy generation running all cores at max speed (make sure you keep CPU temperatures in check).
Once the world is pre-generated, remove C2ME and Sinytra Connector, and add back Presence Footsteps and Hyperbox.

Q: Why aren’t monsters spawning at night?

A: To make early-game travel easier, the PeacefulSurface mod prevents select mobs from spawning on the Overworld’s surface during regular nights. Endermen, illagers and phantoms will still spawn as usual, and monsters can still appear anywhere not directly exposed to the sky. Every few nights, a blood moon will rise, which can’t be skipped by sleeping. During blood moons, all kinds of monsters will spawn on the surface at a significantly higher rate than normal.

Q: Why doesn’t my chunkloader work when I’m offline?

A: BTH is designed to be as server-friendly as possible. Therefore, chunkloaders only forceload chunks when the player who owns the chunkloader is online.

Q: Can I add a mod like Lootr to BTH? / Is there a way to enable per-player loot chests?

A: Lootr is already in the modpack, but disabled by default. To enable it, find the Lootr config file on the server and change the line that says disabled = true to disabled = false.

Q: How do I enable PVP?

A: BTH includes the mod PVP Flagging, and by default all players are unflagged for PVP, making them unable to deal damage to—or be damaged by—other players. This is by design, to encourage you to adventure with your friends without worrying about hurting each other with AOE abilities.

To enable PVP, simply type in the chat /pvpFlag to toggle PVP states, or /pvpFlag [on | off | status] to set your PVP state.

If you are a server admin and want to encourage PVP, here are some recommendations:

Use the command /pvpZone add to define areas in which all players will be flagged for PVP, as well as how close players need to be to it to receive a warning that they're about to enter a PVP zone. You can set this in a very large area to make virtually the entire dimension a PVP zone.
Change the following lines in the PVP Flagging config files to FLAG, so players are automatically flagged for PVP upon joining and after respawning:

player_login_state = FLAG
player_respawn_state = FLAG

Credits

Development

SonoranViking
Jangro
Ollarion
Vaelzan

Art

Lito
Vaelzan

Special thanks to our playtesters, contributors and supporters

Barbotine
Charliezeus101
Cogsworth
cupcakeOBC
Deyder Beonor
Incantatrix
fiona/finn
Foma
goldie0427
Lito
Matsumuri
Munstadme
PetertheGreat
puzzikoo
Robertdebrus
savagecookie
Setos78
Snedglow
Squirrel
StrawberryGnome
ThatEpicTragedy
Toile
Vanderix
XQZmuah

BTH - Beyond The Horizon