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ChunkLOD

BBy BiasHyperion

A Heavily Modified Fork of Farseer, representing terrain, rock type, forestation, and water as LOD's

ChunkLOD

Description

Press Ctrl+Shift+F in-game to bring up a settings menu where you can adjust view distance and various visual settings. (facelighting, the thing that makes it look blocky, can be disabled for a more farseer like look)
1.21.6 backport found here

<span style="font-size: 24pt;">A major overhaul is currently underway that completely eclipses what is now known as ChunkLOD v1. Occasional builds will be released for testers to download. The original implementation will remain available, but it can now be considered more of a "tech demo" compared to the new test builds, more info can be found in the VS Discord ChunkLOD mod chat.</span>

<span style="text-decoration: line-through;">ChunkLOD is a LOD terrain system that lets you see the shape and color of terrain far beyond your normal view distance, by default around 4,000 blocks in all directions. It works by building heightmaps from your world's chunk data and rendering them as simplified 3D terrain that fades naturally into the skybox.</span>

<span style="text-decoration: line-through;">To be clear, the mod won't show "real" chunks with trees, buildings and so on, it renders a colored, lit heightmap that blends with the game's fog and sky. The terrain is colored based on the actual surface blocks in each chunk and influenced by biome data like temperature and forest density, so forests look green, deserts look sandy, and snow-capped peaks appear at high elevations with seasonal variation, more specifically the rockid is the base color, following that is green shading based on forestation, with blue when water would usually be present. This is most strikingly seen in biomes made primarily of basalt, where terrain will be various shades of dark grey, black, and green.</span>

<span style="text-decoration: line-through;">Heightmaps are stored in a lightweight SQLite database per world, so they load quickly for any connecting player and barely use any disk space or RAM. They are static, they won't update when something in a chunk changes, when any chunk loads for any player it will get added to the database and on join players will retrieve it, for reference roughly 4k blocks in all directions is less than 10mb, as all thats stored is a chunks heightmap at 1:1 precision per block and coloring data.</span>

<span style="text-decoration: line-through;">The mod needs to be present on the server in order to work. Players without the mod installed can still connect, they just won't see the distant terrain.</span>

<span style="text-decoration: line-through;">The shader was the most inherited aspect of ChunkLOD from badgersons Farseer, lighting will likewise dynamically shift at night, for reference all the lod images take were at 12 noon in summer, so no terrain wont be permanently colorful 24/7, as seen in the sunset and twilight images,&nbsp;</span>

<span style="text-decoration: line-through;">
Visual settings
</span>

<span style="text-decoration: line-through;">All of these can be tweaked in real-time from the in-game config menu (Ctrl+Alt+F):</span>

<ul class="[li_&amp;]:mb-0 [li_&amp;]:mt-1 [li_&amp;]:gap-1 [&amp;:not(:last-child)_ul]:pb-1 [&amp;:not(:last-child)_ol]:pb-1 list-disc flex flex-col gap-1 pl-8 mb-3">
  • <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">Far view distance (up to 16,384 blocks, server-capped)</span>
  • <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">LOD detail level, choose from multiple grid resolutions, or use "Mixed" mode which automatically increases detail closer to the player</span>
  • <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">Sky tint, color tint, and light level influence</span>
  • <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">Fade bias for the terrain-to-sky transition</span>
  • <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">Optional face lighting for a more three-dimensional look, without it you get something more akin to the original farseer shader, as it's a heavily modified instance of it.</span>
  • <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">Optional globe curvature effect</span>
  • <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">One-click reset to defaults</span>
  • &nbsp;

    <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">Disclaimer: Unlike farseer chunks will only render within the players view naturally, albeit on the flipside the command /wgen&nbsp;pregen [radius] will load into the DB all those chunks, for players looking to preload their view.</span>

    <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">All Credit to badgerson for the original Farseer and inspiration for my implementation/groundwork.</span>

    Read the full description on Vintage Story ModDB →

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