Minecraft maps are huge, and your computer only loads up the area near you (the visibility distance is obviously depending on your "render distance" setting). Loading up chunks of the map into the memory needs and takes system resources.
By default, when you move 5 meters in Minecraft into a direction, "new" chunks front of you will be loaded into the memory, which can slow down things on slower machines or on machines with not enough memory available. You can increase this 5 meter between 32m and 128m in Optifine, so if you have performance problems, and you know that you won't really move around for a while (for example, you want to build a house on the same spot and you don't have to go for materials into the woods or into a mine), you just set "Preloaded chunks" to 8 and you can freely move around in a quite large area near you without having to worry about fps drops caused by chunk loading.
But it must be noted, that moving fast with such settings usually makes things worse most of the times (in my experience), so it's better to leave it OFF if your system can handle the map/scene you are playing in.
So basically, when you are increasing "Preloaded chunks", you moving away from a steady and continuous chunk loading, towards a more periodic (and also more demanding) chunk loading mechanism.
Ah, thank you. I've always know about Minecraft's chunk loading system, but I never knew how Preloaded Chunks affected it.
I've been wondering this for a while but never got around to asking about it: what does Preloaded Chunks do?
And yes, I know about the tooltips and have read the one for this option, but it didn't help at all.
0
0
And yes, I know about the tooltips and have read the one for this option, but it didn't help at all.
0
2