Meshelium

Fixed: chunks could flash invisible for a split second while moving.

Easiest to see over oceans, where the missing chunk showed the dark water underneath and read as a black square blinking in and out. It could happen anywhere terrain was rebuilding: for one frame, a rebuilding chunk had no copy anywhere, because ours was still queued for upload and Minecraft's had already been freed by the duplicate-memory saver. Over land the hole showed whatever terrain was behind it, which is why it went unseen for a full version. It settled down when you stood still and got worse the faster you flew.

The old copy of a rebuilding chunk now stays on screen until its replacement has actually landed on the graphics card. In a one-minute test flight that handover fired about 3,800 times, and every one of them was a black flash that did not happen. A new stress test rebuilds terrain in place and fails the build if the gap ever comes back, and it was written the honest way: we broke the fix on purpose and watched the test catch it before trusting either.

New: Idle Memory Trim, on by default.

Meshelium grows its terrain memory in big steps so that growing stays rare, and until now it kept all the spare room it had ever taken. After half a minute of no terrain streaming, it now hands the unused part back to your graphics card. Measured at render distance 64, that returned 488 MB and left terrain memory 98 percent full instead of 52 percent, with no measurable cost to frame times. Flying somewhere new simply takes the memory again. Combined with 1.2.0's duplicate-memory saver, terrain that used to cost around 1.7 GB of graphics memory now sits at about 540 MB.

The switch is in Advanced. Off restores the old keep-everything behaviour exactly.

New: Greedy Meshing, in Advanced. Off while it proves itself.

Where several neighbouring block faces would look identical on screen, this merges them into one bigger face so there is less geometry to draw. The picture does not change, and a built-in checker we run in testing verifies the merged result covers exactly the same ground as the originals.

How much it helps depends on your Smooth Lighting setting. With Smooth Lighting off it removes about one face in six and was measured at 8 to 10 percent more frames. With it on, Minecraft shades every corner separately, so far fewer faces match and the gain is 2 to 5 percent. Flipping the setting reloads the terrain, so chunks rebuild for a few seconds and you can compare live.

Water-drawing speedup

Transparent terrain like water has to blend back to front, so Meshelium drew it in many small batches to keep the order safe, where a one-draw-per-section fast path had been verified pixel-identical and measured at about 1.3 ms per frame at render distance 64.