Meshelium

Minecraft's duplicate copy of the terrain is now freed, by default.

Minecraft kept a complete second copy of the world in graphics memory even though Meshelium was the one drawing it. Nothing ever read that copy. It was measured at 1.3 to 2.6 times the size of Meshelium's own terrain memory: on a spinning test at 64 chunks it was 3264 MB, and freeing it took total graphics memory for that scene from 5723 MB to 1883 MB. At 120 chunks that is the difference between hitting a 15 GB wall and sitting comfortably at 8.7 GB with everything loaded.

The two renderers now hand over one at a time rather than overlapping, so switching Meshelium on or off reloads the terrain instead of briefly holding both copies at once. You will see chunks rebuild for a few seconds when you flip it. That is the trade, and it is what keeps an 8 GB card from being asked to hold two worlds.

The setting is Duplicate Terrain Memory on the new Advanced screen, and it reads Freed or Kept rather than On or Off, because "Free Duplicate Terrain Memory: OFF" is not a sentence anyone can parse. Choose Kept only if another mod needs Minecraft's own terrain buffers.

Fixed: a graphics memory leak on every world exit.

If your terrain memory had grown past its first block, which it does at any long render distance, every block after the first was never handed back when you left the world. A session at 120 chunks leaked most of its terrain memory each time you quit to the menu, and it accumulated until you restarted the game.

Fog now keeps up with how far you can see.

Minecraft fades distant terrain to fog at a fixed 1024 blocks, and that number ignores your render distance entirely. It was never a problem in vanilla, where the maximum is 32 chunks and the fog sits far beyond the horizon. Past 64 chunks it starts eating the world: at 120 chunks the furthest 56 chunks are loaded, meshed, culled, rasterised, and then painted flat fog colour.

Distance Fog has three choices and ships on Off, which looks the best of the three at long range. Off removes the distance haze and keeps only the short fade right at the edge, which is the part that hides chunks appearing, so the horizon still softens instead of ending in a wall. Match View Distance keeps a haze but moves it out with your render distance, and never makes fog thicker than Minecraft would, so below 64 chunks it changes nothing at all; a slider sets where it finishes as a share of your view, labelled in blocks as well as percent. Minecraft Default leaves everything alone.

Your render distance comes back when you switch Meshelium on again.

Turning Meshelium off pulls the distance down to 32, because Minecraft cannot draw further than that on its own. It now remembers what you had and puts it back when you turn Meshelium on. It will not overwrite a distance you chose yourself while it was off.

A settings screen you can read.

The rows that almost nobody should touch moved behind an Advanced button: duplicate terrain memory, debug logging, and the backend prompt. The main screen keeps what you actually reach for.

Problems now say so in chat.

Errors went to a toast in the corner that fades in a few seconds, and the most useful ones had no player-facing surface at all. They are mirrored into chat now, where they persist and can be screenshotted into a bug report.

Fixed: terrain turning invisible at very high render distances.

At render distance 96 and above, chunks could go see-through once enough world had loaded, and placing a block could make more of them vanish. The terrain was there the whole time, uploaded and intact; the graphics card just could not reach it. There is a limit on how much of a single memory block a shader may read at once, and on most cards that is 4 GB no matter how much memory you have. Past that line reads come back empty, and an empty read looks exactly like an empty chunk. The limit is now measured at startup and respected.

Running out of room now pulls the render distance in instead of breaking.

When terrain memory passes 92 percent, Meshelium lowers the render distance a step and tells you it did. The far chunks are released through Minecraft's own path, so the game knows to rebuild them when you go back. It only ever goes down; the slider in Video Settings shows the new number and you can drag it back up whenever you want.