5 best Minecraft render distance mods

The biggest thing that has held Minecraft's otherwise gorgeous terrain and world-building potential back is the lack of optimization around how the game renders chunks for the player to see. This poor performance has led to disappointingly low render distance caps, with even fewer PCs able to reach these already low maximum settings.

That said, this is one of the areas in which the community has stepped up the most. There are a plethora of incredible mods across all the major Minecraft mod loaders, all aiming to make rendering chunks easier or otherwise implement creative ways to allow for farther views.

Note: This article is subjective and reflects the writer's opinions.

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The 5 best mods for increasing Minecraft render distance

1) Distant Horizons

Mod loaders: Forge, Fabric

The Distant Horizons mod, created by James_Seibel on CurseForge, is the best render distance mod available to players looking to have their Minecraft mega base always visible on the horizon. The concept of the mod is simple: rather than rendering faraway chunks at full resolution, as the vanilla game tries to do, they are instead simplified based on distance and then rendered to the player.

This accomplishes a few things. The first is that this mimics how our eyes work in real life, with more distant objects appearing less detailed. Since the mod incorporates that, the horizon feels much more natural to look at. Additionally, since these distant chunks lack much detail, a lot of them can be rendered, allowing for thousands of possible chunks to be rendered all at once.

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2) Better FPS- Render Distance

In vanilla, all caves are rendered in loaded chunks, no matter how distant (Image via Mojang)

Mod loaders: Forge, Neoforge, Fabric

Better FPS- Render Distance is a spin-off of one of Minecraft's best optimization mods. It changes how the game renders chunks around the player to be more efficient. The vanilla game renders chunks as either a square or cylinder around the player, including all underground areas, even if they are impossible to see or interact with.

Better FPS- Render Distance changes this to be a 3D circle around the player so that only Minecraft caves immediately below the player are rendered at any given time. This increases FPS on the surface and allows players to increase their render distance setting in-game since individual chunks hurt performance less.

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3) Bobby

Mod loaders: Fabric

Bobby is a Fabric-exclusive render distance mod that uses a more brute-force method for extending render distance. Any chunks that a player loads in are then stored locally within the mod's folders and continually rendered, even if they end up farther away than the server would normally show.

The biggest downside to this mod is shared by many of these render distance mods: they are client-side only. While this does mean that they can be used on any of Minecraft's multiplayer servers, check the server's rules to make sure they are not banned mods first. It also means that the player needs to render the chunks themselves.

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4) View Distance Fix

The fixed server fog (Image via henkelmax)

Mod loaders: Fabric, Quilt

View Distance Fix sets itself apart from other view distance mods as it is a server-side mod. It aims to fix the fog issues that arise when a server's render distance is set lower than a client's. The game normally creates a fog at the end of a player's view, but this can make it difficult to see on servers, which normally keep render distances quite low.

View Distance Fix removes this fog effect when the player's client-side render distance is set higher than the server's. This might not let players see as far as they normally would, but it at least makes it easier to see within the otherwise limited area allowed.

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5) Farsight

Farsight - see further! byu/DwarvenSmith infeedthebeast

Mod loaders: Forge, Neoforge, Fabric

Minecraft's Farsight mod is remarkably similar to Bobby. It also stores loaded chunk information locally to keep it rendered even after the server unloads it. However, it separates itself from Bobby in handling the locally stored chunks.

Bobby will store all chunks the player loads locally, with no regard to storage, whereas Farsight has a configurable radius that it stores locally. The mod doesn't keep chunk information outside this radius, keeping file sizes down and performance up.