ViewDistanceTweaks

ViewDistanceTweaks v2.7

Dynamic view distance and simulation distance adjustment per world — lightweight, fully configurable, and built for performance-critical servers.

Every new feature below is off by default. Updating from 2.6 without touching your config changes nothing about how the plugin behaves.

New

• AFK player throttling — a player standing still at spawn doesn't need the same distances as one flying an elytra. Idle players drop to configured minimums and the chunks they free up go back into the global budget for players who are actually playing. Uses Paper's own idle timer, or EssentialsX's AFK state when that plugin is present so /afk counts immediately. An explicit viewdistancetweaks.fixed.<n> permission wins over the throttle.
• Chunk generation safeguard — MSPT variance detection notices the stutter that terrain generation causes, but not the cause. This counts chunks that are genuinely being generated (not merely read from disk) and can lock increases and hard-clamp view distance while someone crosses unexplored terrain at elytra speed.
• Density-based scaling — twenty players scattered across a world load twenty separate rings of chunks; twenty players around one community farm load almost the same chunks. The flat per-player formula can't tell those apart and starves clustered worlds of distance they could easily afford. Players within a configurable radius now grant bonus distance, scaled by how much of the world's population is actually in that cluster.
• Emergency relief — last resort for a world that has run out of distance to give back. Once simulation and view distance sit at their minimum and the server is still overloaded, thunderstorms are cleared and the daylight cycle frozen. Both are restored once MSPT recovers, and each world's original weather and doDaylightCycle setting is remembered — a world you deliberately kept frozen stays frozen.
• Memory safeguard (the one exception: on by default) — distances don't only cost CPU, every extra ring of chunks stays resident in the heap. A server can sit at a perfect 20 ms MSPT and still be one increase away from spending every tick in garbage collection. While free heap is below the configured percentage, all increases are blocked regardless of MSPT; decreases always stay allowed.
• Profiles — named overlays for thresholds, step sizes and hard distance caps, switchable in-game with /vdt profile <name> instead of editing the config mid-event. Ships with event-mode and night-mode examples. Caps apply after every other rule, so a cap of 8 genuinely means 8.
• Chunk complexity weighting — an ocean chunk costs almost nothing; a chunk holding a 500-hopper sorting system can dominate a tick on its own, yet the old formula counted both as one unit. Chunks are now weighted by their tile entities. Inspecting chunks is itself work, so this samples a bounded number per world rather than scanning everything.

Changed

• Relicensed from MIT to GPLv3.
• /vdt status gained lines for the active profile, free heap, throttled AFK players, active emergency relief, per-world chunk generation rate, cluster bonus and complexity multiplier — each shown only when the matching feature is enabled.
• New /vdt profile [name] subcommand with tab-completion.

Dependencies

• Paper 1.21.x / 26.x — required
• PlaceholderAPI — optional
• EssentialsX — optional, only for AFK detection

Support

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Author: LucasTHCR