Distant Horizons Visual Tuning Guide: LOD Quality, Shading, Textures, Clouds, and Fog

Distant Horizons renders simplified level-of-detail (LOD) terrain beyond the normal render distance, and its visual settings control how that distant terrain looks and performs. This guide covers the options that shape LOD quality, shading, textures, clouds, beacons, fog, ambient occlusion, anti-aliasing, and overdraw prevention. All of these are adjusted through the mod's interface rather than through crafting.

LOD Quality and Distance

The LOD Chunk Render Distance Radius sets how far LODs are drawn, measured in chunks. Treat it as a target: your other graphics settings can push the real distance above or below it.

LOD Dropoff Distance controls the spacing between quality drops. Larger values spread drops further apart but cost more memory and GPU time.

Max Horizontal Resolution sets the finest detail LODs can reach, from Fastest (chunk-level) to Fanciest (block-level). A related setting governs how well LODs capture overhangs, caves, and cliffsides; higher options look better but use more resources.

Use Camera Pos for Quality Drop-Off decides whether quality drop-off follows the camera or the player. Camera-based suits free-cam mods; player-based suits multi-camera setups.

Increase Quality When Zoomed In raises LOD detail while zoomed, and Max Zoom Quality Increase caps how many detail levels that boost can add. A vanilla spyglass needs four detail levels to reach full quality.

Shading, Color, and Lighting

The shading option defines how LODs are shaded and can improve shader compatibility. Brightness Multiplier scales LOD brightness (0 is black, 1 is normal, 2 is near white), and Saturation Multiplier scales color intensity (0 is grayscale, 1 is normal, 2 is vibrant). A biome blending setting mirrors vanilla biome blending for the LOD area; any value above 0 slows LOD loading.

Enable Ambient Occlusion adds depth to block lighting. Enable Anti-Aliasing smooths edges and reduces flickering during movement.

Textures

Enable LOD Textures makes nearby and zoomed-in LODs use each block's real texture and silhouette instead of one flat color. It only applies to high-detail LODs, and it does nothing while a shader pack is active. Max Textured Detail Level sets the highest detail level that still gets textures; larger numbers texture more distant LODs at a memory cost.

Several comma-separated block lists refine texturing: blocks that should not render textures, blocks whose sides should use their bottom texture, block tags treated the same way, and blocks that should use rasterization to pick face textures. Each of these requires a restart to change.

Enable Noise Texture applies a noise pattern to LODs to imitate texture, with settings for step count, intensity, and the distance before the noise fades (0 disables fading).

Clouds and Beacons

Enable Generic Rendering allows DH to draw non-terrain objects such as beacon beams and clouds. Enable Beacon Rendering turns LOD beacon beams on, and Beacon render height caps how high they draw (a world reload is needed). Expand Distant Beacons widens beams at extreme distances so they stay visible; otherwise they remain one block wide. Enable Beacon Distance Culling skips beacons near the camera to avoid vanilla overdraw.

Enable Cloud Rendering turns on LOD clouds, and a comma-separated dimension list limits which dimensions show them (world reload required). Enable Multi-layer clouds switches between one vanilla-style layer and three layers at different heights.

Fog

Enable Distant Horizons Fog controls whether fog is drawn on LODs, with a separate color setting. Enable Vanilla Fog controls Minecraft's own fog on vanilla chunks; disabling it may conflict with other fog-editing mods. Advanced Fog Options set where fog starts and ends, minimum and maximum thickness, the thickness calculation (linear, exponential, or exponential squared), and density.

Height Fog Options add height-based fog: a mix mode, a direction, a base height when a set height is used, start and end offsets, a falloff style, and density.

Overdraw Prevention and Culling

Overdraw Prevention decides how far from the camera DH begins rendering, as a percentage of vanilla render distance. A value of -1 switches to automatic mode based on that distance. Higher values hide LODs behind vanilla blocks further out but risk holes in the LODs, especially while flying through unloaded terrain. Reduce Overdraw With Fast Movement pulls the overdraw radius closer to the camera when you move quickly.

Enable Cave Culling culls caves, using Cave Culling Height as the starting Y level. Disable Frustum Culling keeps LODs outside the camera drawn, which costs performance but fixes LODs vanishing at the edges of your view; a separate shadow-pass version exists for shader setups. Fade Nearby DH LODs makes LODs fade as you approach instead of cutting off abruptly.