How to increase render distance in a Minecraft server

Minecraft’s world is one of the most dynamic pieces of programming ever seen in a video game. The game has almost no visible boundaries, and a player’s viewing distance is only limited by the hardware they possess.

This makes the Minecraft world ideal for exploring and discovering new pieces of content like items, mobs, structures, anomalies, examples of weird map generation, new biomes, and more.

Render distance is basically a value that determines how far a player can see from a single point in the in-game world. As one would expect, this depends on the player’s hardware capabilities, as render distance heavily impacts performance.

Minecraft: Steps to change the view distance in a server

Minecraft players who do not know the difference between render distance and view distance need not worry, as they’re quite similar, but not exactly the same thing. Render distance is the amount of chunks that are loaded for the player in every direction from a specific point on the map.

They work from the player’s point of view. These chunks don’t stop loading when the player crosses a certain threshold of loaded chunks.

View distance, on the other hand, refers to the total number of chunks that are loaded into a server, regardless of what the render distance value for any player is set to. This is why the term is only used on online servers instead of the single player mode.

An online Minecraft server only loads a specific amount of chunks each time it is booted up. This means that if a player crosses the threshold of loaded chunks, all they’ll see is the void, as the server will just stop loading any more chunks after that.

For example, if the view distance for a server is set to 20 chunks, and one player has their render distance set to 10, while another has theirs at 32, the former will only see 10 chunks while the latter won’t be able to view more than 20, simply because there’s nothing to see.

To change the view distance on a Minecraft server, players will have to venture into the nitty-gritty of the said server, which means going to the server settings and tweaking stuff from there.

First of all, if the server in question is running, shut it down.
Navigate to the server’s folder and open it.
Scroll down and find the “server.properties” file. This contains all the settings you’ve set for the server, align with their values, limits, and restrictions. This section makes sure that the server doesn’t overshoot its capabilities or the amount of limitations, as that can affect performance.
Open the "server.properties" file in an application that supports it, like wordpad or notepad.
Find the view distance setting, titled as “view-distance=(value)".
A default value can be found for this setting. All players need to do is change it to a value they find suitable for their server.
Press Control+S to save the new value, or do so via the “File” option on the top left of the window.
Close the "server.properties" file and start up your server to experience the new view distance.

Tips for players wanting to change their view distance

As mentioned above, the viewing distance value of a Minecraft server has a major effect on its performance and its ability to govern how much it lags. Therefore, players should change the value of the setting depending on the amount of players who are playing on the server. If the total number of active players is less than 10, then a value of 10 should be the maximum you should use.

However, if the number of players on the server is more than 10 and less than 50, the maximum should go in terms of view distance is eight chunks. If the server starts to lag, drop the value to six, which should act as the sweet spot.