Distant Horizons in Minecraft: see 256+ chunks with Sodium and Iris

Distant Horizons renders far terrain as simplified blocks called LODs, so you see mountains and coasts hundreds of chunks away while Minecraft only loads the area close to you. The default is 256 chunks, against 12 for a usual vanilla setting. On Minecraft 26.3 it runs on Fabric and NeoForge, usually with Sodium for frame rate and Iris for shaders.

Put the files in the mods folder of a Fabric or NeoForge 26.3 instance. Distant Horizons needs no other mod: the Fabric API parts it uses are inside its file. The game needs Java 25, which the launchers select for you. The usual Fabric, Sodium and Iris setup is explained in how to install shaders with Iris and Sodium.

In game, open Options. Distant Horizons adds a small button to the left of the FOV slider: click it. The quick settings show Enable Rendering, Quality Preset, CPU Load and the distance. The menus of Distant Horizons are in English only.

• LOD Chunk Render Distance Radius: how far the far terrain goes, from 32 to 4,096 chunks. The default 256 is a good start; 512 shows huge landscapes.
• Quality Preset: from 1. Minimum to 5. Extreme. The default is 3. Medium; lower it on a weak graphics card.
• Vanilla Render Distance: lower it to 8 to 12 chunks in Video Settings. Distant Horizons fills everything beyond it at a much lower cost.

In a new or barely explored world, Distant Horizons builds the far terrain itself. Enable Distant Generation must be on, and the Distant Generator Plan set to Surface Then Chunks (the default): the rough ground comes first, then trees and villages. Turn on Show LOD Gen/Import Progress to follow it on screen.

The first minutes use a lot of CPU. CPU Load sets how hard it works, from 1. Minimal Impact to 5. I Paid For The Whole CPU, with 3. Balanced by default. What has been generated is saved, so the next sessions start much lighter.

Iris works with Distant Horizons only with shader packs written for it. Photon and Solas, both available for 26.3, list Distant Horizons among their supported mods. With another pack, the far terrain may disappear or look wrong: check the pack's page before installing it.

With the mod only on your side, you see far terrain for the places you have explored, and it stays saved between sessions. If the server runs Distant Horizons too, it sends the far terrain to every player who has the mod and keeps distant generation on. Paper and Spigot servers use a separate plugin, Distant Horizons Support. To host your own, start from how to run a Java server.

1. Give the game more RAM: 6 to 8 GB with a 4 to 8 core processor, as the Distant Horizons team advises. See how to allocate more RAM.
2. Lower CPU Load by one step.
3. Turn off Enable Distant Generation once the area around your base is done.
4. Lower the Quality Preset.