Farfield

Farfield shows your world up to 4,096 blocks away. Mountains, coasts, forests and seas beyond your render distance are drawn as levels of detail (LOD), for a fraction of what real chunks would cost, and the terrain your world has not generated yet is drawn too, so the horizon is never empty.

Minecraft 1.21.1 · NeoForge and Fabric · single player and servers

Far terrain that blends in

• The LODs start exactly where the game’s own terrain ends, with its block colors and textures (modded blocks included), biome tints and Biome Blend, smooth lighting, day and night, and its fog.
• Up close they keep the details that read from afar: water at vanilla’s height, grass and flowers, kelp, and the shapes of fences, walls, panes and stairs. Farther away, coarser levels take over where a block would be smaller than a few pixels on screen (the Detail setting).
• Works with Sodium.

A horizon that is never empty

The terrain your world has not generated yet is previewed from its seed:

• relief, rivers, seas, ice and icebergs, and villages;
• the ground the world’s own surface rules lay there: sand, snow, terracotta, the blocks of biome mods;
• trees, plants and rocks grown where the game will place them, from every mod that adds them;
• the sea floor’s kelp, seagrass and coral reefs.

Real terrain replaces the preview chunk by chunk as you explore. The preview is built in the background, on threads you set. More biomes in the gallery.

Single player and servers

/farfield import builds the LODs of every chunk a world already has, in the background: in single player, or from the server console.

For server owners

Install Farfield on the server and on the players’ clients; both need the same Farfield version (0.2.x) to stream. Settings in config/farfield-server.properties:

• streaming_radius: how far around a player LODs are sent (default 4,096 blocks).
• player_kbps and total_kbps: bandwidth caps per player and for all players (defaults 1,024 and 10,240 KB/s); the game’s own packets always pass first.
• full_data: off by default, so only what is seen from the sky down is sent. Caves and ores stay out of the LODs your players receive.
• preview and preview_features: the preview around each player, with the world’s features, built on low-priority threads (on by default). preview_feature_exclude leaves out features by id (biomesoplenty:*, *:patch_*).

Compatibility

Tested with Sodium 0.8, Iris installed (shader pack off), C2ME, ModernFix, Lithium, FerriteCore and Sinytra Connector, in a NeoForge pack of 386 mods and a Fabric pack of 76, with Biomes O’ Plenty and Terralith in the preview. Other LOD mods (Distant Horizons, Voxy) are not tested beside it: use one at a time.

Settings

Mod Menu on Fabric, the mods list on NeoForge, or a key you bind in Controls > Key Binds > Farfield: distant terrain on or off, detail, textures, fog distances, the preview, building threads, level colors and performance logs.

Commands: /farfield render, detail, textures, fog, preview, import, debug levels in single player; on a server, players use /farfieldclient for the drawing ones.

Requirements

• A graphics card with OpenGL 4.6. macOS stops at OpenGL 4.1, so Farfield draws nothing there.
• Fabric: Fabric API. Mod Menu is optional.

Not there yet

• Shader packs (Iris, Oculus): planned next.
• Light from blocks in the preview (glowing plants, sea pickles): with shader pack support; the real LODs have it already.
• Beyond 4,096 blocks: planned.

Feedback

Bugs and ideas: GitHub issues. Source: github.com/JordanOlivet/farfield.