Minecraft 1.21 Distant Horizons mod: Download guide, installation, and features

The Distant Horizons mod for Minecraft has quickly caught the attention of players with its render distance-increasing feature. Minecraft has a huge, beautiful open world with diverse biomes and landscapes. However, even after cranking up the render distance setting in the vanilla game, players could not see far enough to fully appreciate it.

Although numerous visual and world generation mods have been released in the past, none perform as well as the Distant Horizons mod at increasing the render distance to absurd levels while maintaining decent frame rates. With the new 1.21 Tricky Trials update out, the developers of Distant Horizons have updated the mod to support it.

In this article, we guide players on how to install the mod and discuss some of its settings and features.

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Minecraft mod guide: Installing the Distant Horizons mod

128 chunks render distance (Image via Mojang Studios)

Pushing the boundaries of possibilities, the Distant Horizons mod is designed solely to increase the render distance of the game without making the game unplayable. It achieves a high render distance by introducing simplified terrain beyond the chunks the game is set to render.

Here are the detailed steps that players can follow to install the Distant Horizons mod in Minecraft 1.21:

1. Download the Fabric installer.
2. Launch the downloaded .exe file and select version 1.21.
3. Ensure that the selected game directory is correct and click on the install button.

Once the installation is completed, players need to launch the new Fabric installation to let the launcher download the necessary files. Then, they can close the game and follow these steps:

1. Download the Distant Horizons mod for version 1.21 from Modrinth.
2. Move the downloaded mod to the game's mod folder. To quickly access it, press WIN+R and enter "%appdata%/.minecraft/mods". This will open the mods folder only if the game is installed in the default location.

The mod is now installed and can be played by launching the Fabric installation.

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Distant Horizons settings

Distant Horizons mod settings (Image via Mojang Studios)

After launching a world in the new fabric installation with the Distant Horizons mod, the game will take a while to load the new chunks beyond the render distance set.

The mod's render distance setting is set to 128 by default and can be accessed by clicking on the icon that appears next to the FOV settings. A render distance of 128 is quite high, and increasing it is not recommended as it usually causes unnecessary lag.

Players with a midrange system can set the CPU Load to Balanced and test it out. Any higher than that is not recommended. Aside from these settings, players should leave everything else at default and ensure that the 'Enable Rendering' setting is set to True.