Distant Horizons — VulkanMod Extension

A Fabric extension mod that adds native Vulkan rendering to Distant Horizons via VulkanMod.

LODs are rendered using VulkanMod's Vulkan pipeline instead of OpenGL, enabling Distant Horizons to work on systems and configurations running VulkanMod.

This is not a standalone mod. You must have both Distant Horizons and VulkanMod installed. Versions v2.4.6+vm.3 and earlier were standalone forks of DH; Newer versions are a separate extension mod that runs alongside unmodified DH. Tested for Minecraft versions 1.20.6 and 1.21.11.

Distant Horizons LODs rendered via VulkanMod's Vulkan backend

Status

✅ Working

• LOD terrain rendering with correct colors and vertex format
• Lightmap support (day/night cycle, block light)
• Depth integration (LODs render behind MC terrain)
• Transparency / alpha blending (water, glass, etc.)
• Ambient occlusion (SSAO)
• Distance and height fog (all falloff types and mixing modes)
• Noise / dithering on LODs
• Fade / clip distance transitions
• Earth curvature rendering
• Cloud rendering with correct depth against LOD terrain (VM 0.6+)
• Weather effects (rain, snow) render correctly in front of LODs

⚠️ Not Yet Implemented

• Shader pack support — VulkanMod does not support shader packs (Iris/OptiFine)
• Wireframe debug mode

See docs/vulkan_implementation_roadmap.md for the full technical roadmap.

Requirements

• Minecraft: 1.20.6 or 1.21.11
• Mod loader: Fabric
• VulkanMod must be installed (0.4.2 for MC 1.20.6, 0.6.1 for MC 1.21.11)
• Distant Horizons 2.4.0+ or 3.0.0+ must be installed

This is not the official Distant Horizons mod. For the original, see the GitLab or CurseForge pages.

Building

# MC 1.21.11
./gradlew :vulkan:build -PmcVer="1.21.11"

# MC 1.20.6
./gradlew :vulkan:build -PmcVer="1.20.6"

The compiled jar will be in vulkan/build/libs/.

Source Code Setup

Prerequisites

• JDK 21 or newer — https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/downloads/
• Git — https://git-scm.com/

IntelliJ IDEA

1. Install the Manifold plugin
2. Open IDEA and import the build.gradle
3. Refresh the Gradle project if required

Other commands

./gradlew --refresh-dependencies   # refresh dependencies
./gradlew genSources               # generate MC source for browsing

Source code uses Mojang mappings & Parchment mappings.

Open Source Acknowledgements

• Forgix — jar merging
• LZ4 for Java — data compression
• NightConfig — JSON & TOML config handling
• sqlite-jdbc — SQLite driver