After several months of experimental snapshots, finally last week we had the first snapshot of Minecraft 1.18 without that last name. It was no surprise, since as we had already told you about the launch of experimental snapshot 7, this was going to be the last of its kind, since Mojang’s plans were to take all the work they had done so far to a “standard” snapshot. And well they did, because just a few days later, last week, snapshot 21w37a was released, of which we can almost say that its main novelty was … not being experimental.
This week we have again had a snapshot of Minecraft 1.18, the 21w38a, but in this case, in addition to some adjustments and improvements, such as an increase in the amount of copper and the resizing of the deposits of lapis lazuli, we find a really interesting configuration setting, and that will allow users to adjust the operation of the game to the performance of their system, to improve both performance and the gaming experience.
As you already know, if you are a Minecraft player, A traditional setting to improve performance was to adjust the number of chunks around the player that are rendered. At a greater distance, better views, but also worse performance, since the PC has to draw all those elements of the map and, in addition, manage the entities that populate them. This has been the case until Minecraft 1.17 but, except for changes, it will stop being this way in Minecraft 1.18.
And now, when entering the Minecraft 1.18 configuration menu, more specifically the graphic section, we find a new setting available, which at the moment is called Simulation Distance. And what can we adjust with it? Then the distance, also in chunks, at which the in-game entities will be charged and activated. Thus, we can continue adjusting the rendering distance, but we can set a smaller distance for the simulation.
What is it used for? As you already know, Minecraft 1.18 is the second part of Caves & Cliffs, and more specifically, the part in which we will finally be able to enjoy the majestic new mountains, and the huge underground caves. Elements of the environment in which, without a doubt, we will want to have a high rendering distance. Until now, that forced us to also load all the entities of those chunks, but now we can, for example, render at 16 chunks, but activate the simulation only at 6. This is just an example, of course, the key will be that each user experiment with different settings, until they find the one that best suits their PC performance and their priorities.
With these new settings we can, for example, see the mountains from a distance, and we will also avoid those occasions when, when we are flying with elytra, we enter chunks that have not yet been loaded, momentarily leaving us in the middle of nowhere. Of course, this will also be helped by the changes in the elytra themselves that we already told you about when talking about experimental snapshot 7, and that we will also see in Minecraft 1.18.
More information: Mojang
