I See Your Chunks

# I See Your Chunks !(https://img.shields.io/badge/modloaders-fabric-blue?style=for-the-badge) !(https://img.shields.io/badge/minecraft-26.2-green?style=for-the-badge) !(https://img.shields.io/badge/clients_need-voxy-red?style=for-the-badge) !(https://img.shields.io/badge/license-AGPL%203.0-lightgrey?style=for-the-badge) **I See Your Chunks** renders distant players standing on **real terrain**, far past your render distance. Instead of a player model floating in empty space at the edge of the world, the server streams the chunks that player is standing in, and your client draws them as actual geometry with real occlusion, live block updates, and correct depth against your LOD terrain. > ⚠️ **Clients need (https://modrinth.com/mod/voxy).** Voxy is what renders the streamed terrain. Without it a client still shows distant players and mobs, but floating with no ground under them. Dedicated servers do **not** need Voxy (it's a client-only mod). See (https://www.google.com/search?q=%23%EF%B8%8F-how-it-works). --- ## ✨ Features ### Core Functionality * **🌍 Real Terrain, Not Ghosts:** Distant players are rendered on the actual chunks they occupy, not floating in the void * **🚫 Zero Generation Cost:** Only chunks **already loaded** on the server are streamed; nothing new is generated, loaded, or ticked * **🔄 Live Block Updates:** When a block changes in a streamed chunk the server re-sends that whole chunk and the client re-ingests it, so distant terrain updates in place (torches, lava, and builds all appear live) * **♾️ Far Past the Render Sphere:** Terrain renders well beyond Voxy's own render sphere by injecting only the streamed columns as extra render roots, with no cost for the empty disc in between. Voxy's projection far plane is pushed out from its hardcoded 48,000, and distant players are held to the same reach, so a viewed player and the ground under them always clip together. That reach tracks the visibility-distance slider live (up to 1,024,000 blocks at the slider's maximum), so raising the slider extends both terrain and players immediately, with no reconnect. The 1,024,000 ceiling is a deliberate "more than enough" cap, not a technical limit (reverse-Z depth means it could go further at no real cost) * **💡 Real Lighting:** Far terrain is lit from the chunk packet's actual block + sky light, so torches and lava glow and shadows fall correctly, instead of a flat approximation * **🎯 Correct Occlusion:** Because the terrain is genuinely present client-side, a player behind a hill is actually hidden with no partial-occlusion guesswork * **📡 Opt-In Handshake:** Clients announce themselves; the server sends nothing to anyone who didn't ask ### Advanced Features * **👁️ Mobs on Shared Ground:** Mobs sitting in the terrain streamed around a viewed player are shown too, standing on that same real ground, never floating in isolation * **🐴 Mounts Ride Along:** Whatever a viewed player is riding is always shown with them (the boat, the horse, the mount's mount) even at zero terrain, so nobody sits on thin air * **🎚️ Adjustable Terrain Footprint:** A slider picks how many chunks surround each viewed player, growing nearest-first from just their chunk out to a radius, capped at the server's render distance * **🛡️ Vanish-Aware:** Spectators, invisible, and vanished players (melius-vanish) are filtered server-side before any bandwidth is spent * **📊 Bandwidth Bounded:** Hard caps on streamed chunks per viewer, a configurable footprint, and a configurable update interval * **🤝 Degrades Gracefully:** Vanilla client on a modded server, or modded client on a vanilla server; both fall back to plain vanilla behaviour --- ## ⚙️ How It Works The mod is split cleanly across the network boundary: 1. **Client → Server (handshake):** On join, the client sends how far out it wants distant players revealed and how many chunks of terrain it wants around each one. The server replies with an ack (its own render distance and whether streaming is on) so the client can keep its slider and chunk storage in step with reality. A vanilla client never sends the handshake and receives nothing. 2. **Server (streaming):** Each tick interval, the server finds revealable players within that distance and sends the chunks nearest each one, grown nearest-first from the chunk they stand in (default 3×3), capped at the server's render distance, plus a one-chunk **neighbour halo** around that patch. Only already-resident chunks are sent, and only those vanilla hasn't already sent to that viewer. Mobs standing in the visible patch (not the halo) are revealed alongside the terrain. 3. **Client (acceptance):** The client's chunk-cache storage radius is widened so those out-of-range chunks are accepted instead of dropped. 4. **Client (Voxy hand-off):** Each streamed far chunk is converted straight into Voxy's LOD store as it arrives, using the real block + sky light