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

CC BY NC SA 4.0 Liscence, source at https://github.com/Wizardtastic/Ecstatic

To get the best possible experience, I would highly suggest turning your vanilla render distance up to 24 from the default 12, LODs really don't look that great up close

---

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 works and also the sheer volume of edge cases.

Shaders will attempt to run, however view bobbing, LOD fading, trees, and anything to do with transparency will be broken.

You will experience bugs, please do not report them. 
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 144 chunks additionally generated on top of vanilla render distance. It can be raised up to 200% (292 chunks), and lowered to 25% (38 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

Generation times are CPU bound

---

Question:

Can you see faraway structures with Ecstatic?

Yes, faraway structures should be shown in LOD terrain (However this feature is being retired for a bit in 1.4.0 since it needs some work)

---

Question:

How smooth is Ecstatic with elytra?

Answer:

Medium smooth, LODs may struggle to keep up based on your machine

---

What's next?

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

• Full shader support through Iris/Oculus
• Server support
• Incresed render distance VIA flat Terrain (Up to 1k chunks potentially, basically just doing what farplanetwo does as another LOD)
• Zooming on terrain promotes it to higher quality terrain
• French translation
• Better tree system

And we might add later

• Support for mods with custom biomes
• Optifine Support
• Translations to other languages

Made in Canada

Please tell me VIA the issue tracker at the repo 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.

If you want the source, it is hosted at the source link. As per the liscence you are allowed to modify or remix and distribute the source, however it has to be released under the same CC BY-NC SA 4.0 liscence with attribution!

Fully welcome for use in modpacks, I don't consider monetization from curseforge or modrinth packs/remixes to be "Commercial". Forks that add large meaningful improvements overtop of my mod can also be monetized exclusively on Curseforge, Modrinth, or any other similar modding platform that pays its creators through ad revenue.