Ecstatic

Ecstatic is an LOD mod designed to be as efficient and as close to vanilla performance as possible, while allowing you to hit render distances of over 256 chunks

How does Ecstatic work?

Instead of actually loading faraway chunks like Distant Horizons (Which is incredibly CPU and RAM heavy and takes sometimes upwards of an hour to fully load all the chunks for a 256 chunk render distance), Ecstatic samples the seed in a grid to form more efficient terrain geometry to be rendered at faraway distances. This technique is both lighter on the CPU and GPU for generating and rendering terrain at far distances.

Shaders

At this stage in development, shaders are strongly advised against. Adding shaders is a much bigger project given the way iris exposes its phase system and also the sheer volume of edge cases. If you are dead set on using shaders, Potato Shader looks the best so far, turn off fog in shader settings for best results. 

Shader support is currently in the works

Q and A

Question: 

Does Ecstatic work with Sodium/Embeddium and other similar performance mods?

Answer:

Yes. It is fully compatable with Sodium, while not required is heavily reccomended to get your performance as high as possible

Question: 

How high is Ecstatic's render distance by default?

Answer:

Ecstatic's render distance by default (100% render distance) is 132 chunks additionally generated on top of vanilla render distance. It can be raised up to 200% (264 chunks), and lowered to 25% (35 chunks). Keeping your render distance at 100% is reccomended at the moment, performance loss scales exponentially.

Question: 

Does Ecstatic work with terrain generation mods like Terralith or Tectonic?

Answer:

Ecstatic is fully compatible with Tectonic since it doesn't add any new biomes. Terralith does not have full compatability. Biomes may look the wrong color or have the wrong trees at a distance, this goes for all mods introducing new biomes.

Question: 

How long does it take Ecstatic to generate LOD terrain?

Answer:

On a new world, it takes about 5 divided by the number of threads you allocated for all the LOD terrain to load in at 100% view distance. Expect about

• ~1 - 4 minutes on lower end machines
• ~50 seconds on mid range machines 
• ~20 seconds on high end machines
• ~2 seconds on the latest AMD threadripper

Question: 

Can you see faraway structures with Ecstatic?

Answer:

No, since Ecstatic only renders terrain, you cannot. This is a feature that may come in a future update however.

Question: 

How smooth is Ecstatic with elytra?

Answer:

Medium smooth, gaps in terrain might happen/frame drops so beware!

What's next?

At the moment the mod is still in alpha. For full release we are working on

• Full shader support through Iris/Oculus
• Server support
• Incresed render distance VIA billboard Terrain (Up to 1k chunks potentially)
• Improved terrain rendering/better looking generated terrain
• Zooming on terrain promotes it to higher quality terrain
• French translation 
• All vanilla biomes

And we might add later (or at release)

• Support for mods with custom biomes
• Optifine Support
• Translations to other languages
• Structures appear in LOD terrain

Made in Canada

Please tell me VIA https://github.com/alchemyfour/ecstatic-issues/issues if there are any features you'd like to see or any bugs you find, any feedback is very appreciated this early on in development. As for now, I'm only doing Forge/Fabric 1.20.1 just for testing purposes, but if there's a specific version you would like me to do a build for, leave an issue in the issue tracker repo and I'll try to make a build for you!