How to Change Your Minecraft Server View Distance
Last modified on Feb 10, 2025 in Control Panel
Overview
Within Minecraft you will have a specific view distance that determines how far you can see in-game. This can make for extremely beautiful landscapes with large view distances that span hundreds of blocks. You may find that the default view distance on your server is either too much or not enough for your specific needs. In an attempt to increase the view distance you may have opened the menu of the game and adjusted the render distance value there. Unfortunately, that will have no effect on the server. This is due to the server controlling the max view distance around each player. The default setting is 10 and can be increased or decreased to fit your specific needs for the server. In this guide, we will show you how to adjust the view distance on your Apex Hosting server!
How to Change Server View Distance
The server view distance is the amount of world data that the server will send to the client. This will be measured in chunks in each direction as a radius. As an example of how many chunks are loaded, we can take the default view distance of 10 and double it to get the diameter of the view distance. Multiply that value by itself and we get a total of 400 chunks loaded around each player with a default view distance of 10. To adjust the view distance you can follow the below steps.
- Head to your Apex Panel and stop the server.
- Select the Config Files tab on the left-hand side.
- Next, click Server Settings.
- Once inside of the server settings locate the View Distance field.
- You can set this to any value you prefer from 3-32.
- Click save at the bottom of the page and then start the server back up.
While you can set this value all the way up to 32 we would advise against anything above 10. Taking the previous example of 400 chunks per player on a 10 view distance into account, a 16 view distance would bump up the loaded chunks per player to over 1,000. This can start causing major lag on some servers.
Common Issues
Lag
After changing the view distance on the server you may notice the server could start to lag when out exploring. If this is the case we recommend you try lowering the view distance by 1 to see if it helps. If the lag continues you can keep tinkering with the value to see what works for you. Every server is different so there is no set value that will work perfectly.
No Change in Game
You may have altered the view distance on the server but see no change in-game. First, check that the change was saved. If the setting has reverted then you most likely did not save. After you are sure it has been saved restart the server to let that take effect. If you are still not noticing any difference in-game you can try adjusting your client-side render distance as it may be lower than what the server’s view distance is set to thus causing your vision in-game to not change.
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