Help
View distance and the extended horizon
By Ryleigh Newman · Published
The View Distance settings in Rockstar Shaders draw the world far past Minecraft's render distance. With Extended horizon on, which is the default, every chunk you have seen stays on the horizon as colored terrain, and in singleplayer the saved world is read from disk out to Horizon distance: 64 chunks by default, which is 1,024 blocks. The four settings sit on the front page of the settings screen under "View", beside vanilla's own Render Distance and Simulation Distance buttons, and each one applies at once.
I made Rockstar Shaders, a Fabric mod for Minecraft Java 26.3 on Apple Silicon Macs, and the horizon is the part of it that changes the scale of the world the most. This page covers the four settings, where the far terrain comes from, the Pregenerate World page that fills in ground the world has never generated, and what the horizon cannot do.
Download free (1.0.0) Modrinth (pending)Minecraft 26.3, Fabric, macOS on Apple silicon. Install guide. Releases and bug reports on GitHub.
What Extended horizon draws
The far chunk columns are drawn as colored terrain into the same G-buffer as vanilla's terrain, behind it, so the deferred lighting, the fog, the clouds and the anti-aliasing treat them as geometry rather than a painted backdrop. Chunks are batched into regions of 8 by 8 chunks at a detail that coarsens with distance: full blocks just outside the vanilla ring, then cells of 2, 4, 8 and 16 blocks. Regions are frustum-culled, meshed on a worker thread, and cross-faded when their detail level changes. A dithered band two chunks wide joins vanilla's textured terrain to the far terrain over 32 blocks. A per-chunk height map casts the shadows of far mountains that the shadow cascades cannot reach, and far water keeps the color of its bed. The tip on the toggle says it in one line: "Draws the world far beyond the vanilla view as colored terrain: every chunk you have seen stays on the horizon, and in singleplayer the saved world is read from disk out to the distance below."
Where the far terrain comes from
A column on the horizon has one of three sources. First, chunks the client has received are summarized and kept after they unload, so on a multiplayer server everywhere you have been stays on the horizon. Second, in singleplayer, chunks that exist on disk are read through the integrated server's region storage, decoding only the block and biome sections, so a world you have explored for years shows what is on disk out to the horizon distance. Third, in singleplayer, chunks that have never been generated can be asked from the integrated server one at a time, out to Generate horizon. The horizon can only draw ground that exists in one of those three places. On a server it holds nothing the client was never sent, and it has no way to read the server's disk.
Horizon distance
Horizon distance is how far the horizon reaches, in chunks: 32, 48, 64, 96 or 128. The default is 64, which is 1,024 blocks; 128 is 2,048 blocks. It applies at once. Vanilla's Render Distance and Simulation Distance keep their own meaning and their own buttons on the same page: textured terrain ends at the render distance, and the horizon starts just outside that ring. A longer horizon draws more regions at the coarser detail levels. I have no measured number for what each step costs, so the honest way to find out on your machine is the Show pass timings overlay on the Performance and Overlays page, with the horizon at 64 and then at the value you want.
Generate horizon
Generate horizon quietly generates ground the horizon needs but the world has never generated, out to this many chunks, one chunk at a time. The choices are Off, 16, 32, 48 and 64 chunks, a fresh install shows 64, and it never reaches past the horizon distance. It is singleplayer only, because the integrated server does the work. Off keeps the far field to what already exists on disk. The limit that matters: what it generates is not saved. Every chunk it asks for is generated again next session, so the fill of a big new world is repeated each time you load it. If you want the ground to stay, that is what the Pregenerate World page is for.
Pregenerate world
"Rockstar Shaders: Pregenerate World" is reached from the "World" group on the front page, and it is the persistent version of Generate horizon: every chunk it generates is real server-thread work and is written to disk. You give it a center in chunk coordinates (the world coordinate divided by 16, or Center on me), a radius in chunks up to 512, a shape, and how many chunks to generate at once, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 or 8, default 2, which can be changed while it runs. A square of radius r is (2r+1) squared chunks, so radius 32 is 4,225 chunks and radius 64 is 16,641; a circle is about 21% fewer. While it runs you see chunks done, the rate in chunks per second, time left, elapsed time, the size of the world on disk and an estimate of what this run adds at roughly 24 KB per chunk. Expect about 1 to 3 MB per hundred chunks. It can be paused, resumed and stopped, and the Start button is disabled without an integrated server, so it is singleplayer only.
Menu opacity and seeing the world through the menu
Menu opacity is the fourth setting under "View" and has nothing to do with distance: it is how solid the Rockstar Shaders menus stay when See-through is on, from 0.15 to 1.0 in steps of 0.05, default 0.6. See-through is the button beside it. With it on, every Rockstar Shaders page stops painting its backdrop and fades its widgets to that opacity, so you can move the horizon distance and watch the horizon change without closing the menu. Lower shows more of the world and makes the labels harder to read. Holding F1 on any of these pages hides the menu completely until you let go. The rest of the keys are on Keys and shortcuts.
Download free (1.0.0) Modrinth (pending)Minecraft 26.3, Fabric, macOS on Apple silicon. Install guide. Releases and bug reports on GitHub.
Related
Questions
How far does the extended horizon reach?
64 chunks by default, which is 1,024 blocks. Horizon distance can be set to 32, 48, 64, 96 or 128 chunks, and the change applies at once.
Does the extended horizon work on a multiplayer server?
Yes, for the chunks your client has received: everywhere you have been stays on the horizon after it unloads. The mod cannot read the server's disk, and Generate horizon is singleplayer only, so on a server the horizon never shows ground you have not visited.
Does Generate horizon save the chunks it generates?
No. Ground generated on demand for the horizon is not written to disk and is generated again next session. Pregenerate World is the feature that saves what it generates.
Does the extended horizon replace vanilla's render distance?
No. Vanilla's Render Distance and Simulation Distance keep their meaning and sit on the same page. Textured terrain still ends at the render distance; the horizon draws colored terrain beyond it.
How much disk does pregeneration use?
The page estimates roughly 24 KB per chunk before you start, which works out to about 1 to 3 MB per hundred chunks. A square of radius 64 chunks is 16,641 chunks.