🔭 FarSight

This plugin lets vanilla clients render extreme distances with entity data without sacrificing server performance.

Why FarSight?

As a server owner/admin, have you seen players vanish once they are a certain number of blocks away from each other? It is Minecraft's view-distance, which you can change in server.properties. But the problem with that is it's very inefficient to render players or entities which are far from each other, since it loads chunks in a ring-like structure. so if you want to be able to see a player from 270 blocks away 16 chunks), your server will have to load about 803 chunks!

This plugin solves this exact issue. Instead of loading all the unnecessary chunks around the player, it loads only those chunks which are between the players. So players can see each other and even different kinds of entities from great distances.

Detail Explanation

Dynamic view distance lowers the view distance and loads the chunks between players. This way, the server doesn't add extra chunks to memory; it unloads chunks which are not close to players, saving server performance.

To give players sight of huge landscapes, the plugin uses ghost chunks. Ghost chunks are on the client but not on the server. The plugin comes with an inbuilt chunk generator which generates chunks and stores them on disk. When a player joins the server, the plugin sends them the chunk data but doesn't actually load them in memory. So only the client sees those chunks (if their render distance is high enough).

View without Chunk Caching mod

Commands

Commands	Use
/farsight autogenerate <true/false>	Toggle auto chunk generation when no one's online
/farsight radius	Set chunk generation radius
/farsight center	Set chunk generation centre
/farsight start	Force start generation immediately
/farsight stop	Pause generation immediately
/farsight status	View generator progress

Note

The plugin heavily relies on Minecraft packets; metadata of players playing from VIA version or VIA Backwards may look broken (Improper skins of the player joined by this plugin).