another question popped up for us: how does the game handle respawning enemies near your base?
i know that there are different difficulties when it comes to planets, with increasing hostility. there’s also the meteors that can fall randomly and spawn enemies near them. if i have an area set for mself to build in, can a meteor fall near it? or can enemies spawn inside of that area? do those things change on the more hazardous planets?
I haven’t had a meteor spawn within a certain distance of my base, but I have aggro’d some enemies that worked their way passed my doors. I haven’t ever had an enemy spawn IN my claimed area, or a meteor destroy my base or anything like that.
I have no problem with limits, as long the quality of the rendering can be improved, large buildings are contextualizing really bad at distance where it just looks messy, that I’m not sure if it is the meshes or not but it doesn’t like things like this without something that kills detail and can make it literally blend with the terrain (as terrain) 
Meteorites should not be able to spawn any closer than 60M from your settlement, that’s what i’ve heard, but i’ve seen some meteorites land seemingly closer.
With my base, I’ve claimed an entire island so no mobs bother me at all unless I go near the entrance. I still hear meteorites fall every now and then but I never have the mobs from them trickle in while I’m home.
I imagine if you are plotted on regular land that you’d probably have to plot a larger area to prevent mobs from wandering in or spawning nearby as mobs will not spawn in settlements or plotted areas. So if you just plot a house they could spawn directly outside of it.
@TheBacon have you tinkered around with the graphics settings? I think the one you might want to check is called target minimum FPS. If it is set to anything but off, it will constantly change your graphics settings so that you are always at a minimum of 60 FPS (or whatever it’s set to) so that means changing the render distance and quality. I keep mine set to off. It will respect the other settings you’ve made and operate as expected. hope that helps 
Oh it’s not the graphic settings, it’s just how the game renders overall, things too big and detailed will not good from afar, and that is unlike Minecraft where it’s the oposite, but i think the thing is more core to the game itself, the terrain quality, etc…
Give us an example then, what building looks bad from where? I have the same problem, but only when I lower the settings to get more fps.
(Assuming I’m understanding you) it is a graphics setting.
As the draw distance increases there is a N^2 increase in the voxel geometry. We wanted to make sure everyone could have a 1km draw distance so that they could always see another build or biome on the horizon - so we created a Level of Detail system for the voxel chunks. This makes the rendering massively more efficient but reduced the visual quality.
There is an option that pushes out these draw distances. Set this to Extreme or Ultimate.
We could offer more options for players who have the bandwidth, video RAM, and CPU to render higher fidelity at a greater range.
Keep in mind, @TheBacon, everything has limits, and maybe you should focus on being a savory snack meat. 
I completely get what you’re saying. Did you try setting your FPS to allow for a snails pace? Then it extends the LOD to the point that it will cripple even the most impressive system.
I don’t think it is about that then, not how much and the distance it is rendering, yet how good do the terrain and larger higher detailed buildings look at the distance, it’s really hard to explain on my side, see this official game screenshot what I was mentioning is how “dilluted” and blended can something big with a lot of details look even at medium distance that coming from MC I just can’t help but feel there’s something amiss in how it hits visually that looks sub-par to the game’s more impressive lightning and immersive distance rendering.
Yes I have maxed all I could, the drops to 20’s on Therka Market don’t bother me much at this stage but still the distance visuals still hit me as like something is amiss or sub-par like I mentioned James, tho hard to explain what is it. hmm
Oh, I gotcha, my delicious bud.
Well, in the distance as James said the level of detail is scaled down both on terrain and textures. Are you sure this isn’t what is causing your issue? For an example of the texture LoD, walk away from some glass and you will see the borders disappear.
Have your tried turning off the depth of field? That blurs the distance terrain.
Jiivita did a video on the setting here Player list & Lore | Jiivita's Corner
I think he’s just referring to lods being ‘blocky’
Since he mentioned minecraft, unmodded pc minecraft has a maximum (Extreme) draw distance of 512 blocks. Boundless has a default (the biggest) draw distance of 1024blocks, and with the highest quality lod settings, the non-lodded highest detail blocks should be to 256 blocks’ish. So from that perspective only, minecraft is ‘more detailed’ in the distance even if boundless renders twice as far away in total
Will there be any effort to increase the LOD distance in the future or is that a strict limitation?
There is not a strict limit on how much the detail could be pushed out (other than increase cpu/ram/vram/bandwidth (and bandwidth on our end too)), but there is technically a strict limit on draw-distance without a lot of added complexity (world wrap… if your draw distance was large enough you should be able to see the “same” chunk at multiple lod levels potentially multiple times within the same render of the world (portals are independent renders so dont hit that issue)), world size is 288 chunks, largest lod is lod 4 with a chunk being 256m wide, so to ensure you cannot even “try” to see the same chunk twice (wont work) the maximum possible render distance is about 2000m I think.
Here’s modifying the client/server to force it to be allowed (my computer is not super-high end but was struggling on fps (about 15) here), here is 2K render distance with double lods (so lod0 ends at 512m same as minecraft on highest settings… and then an extra 1.5Km of successively increasing lods) I spread the game screen across both my monitors and put the fov up to 110 as well to get a huge screenshot ;p
funny thing here… is that 2k draw distance means that the end of the terrain here is roughly half-way around the world ;p Tell that to those silly “round” earthers 
(/s)
Any chance that we peasants can get our hands on that build too? 
Or would this occupy too much bandwidth on your side?
But… The world is a square… 
@James. I did send a PM but didn’t hear back. Assumed you were busy so I just ended up rebuilding the area because I wasn’t sure when/if you all would raise the limit. Just for the record, I determined the “mesh limit” to be 512 per chunk. Personally if feel that is way too low at should be at least doubled to 1024 but would prefer you all approach the problem as I suggested in my PM (average on larger set of multiple chunks/plots) if it makes sense.
