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View & rendering

The View & Rendering section of the dock (its ☀ dock tab opens it) is split in three: Show — what's drawn in the viewport — Camera — how the world is projected onto the screen — and Rendering — how well it's drawn, including Vibrant Visuals (PBR lighting, sun, shadows, and time of day). A performance HUD can show live memory use.

Show

The three toggles you reach for most sit in a Show group at the bottom of the tool rail, under the editing tools: Mobs, Barriers and Biome. They're view switches rather than tools — they change what you see, not what a click does — so they're set apart from the tools above them. Every one of them also has a checkbox in the View & Rendering section's Show list, and both surfaces stay in step whichever you use.

The Show list also carries the Grid, Build plane, Navigator and Highlight edits on maps toggles. Any of them can be found by name in the command palette (Ctrl+K).

A setting that depends on another one — Mob distance under Mobs, Plane height under Build plane, the whole Vibrant Visuals group under the Fast/Vibrant switch — is indented beneath it and greyed out while it's off, rather than disappearing. The panel keeps the same shape whatever you toggle, so nothing jumps out from under the pointer.

Camera

Perspective is the normal view: things further away look smaller, the way your eye sees them. Orthographic drops that falloff, so parallel edges stay parallel however far away they are. Two walls the same length look the same length, and a chunk-aligned selection reads as a clean rectangle instead of a trapezoid — which is what makes it worth switching to when you are lining something up or measuring a build by eye.

Next to the switch, Views takes you to a straight-on angle — Top, Front, Right or Iso — framing your selection there. See Straight-on views for the full set, the keys, and how zooming changes in orthographic.

Rendering

View distance sets how far the world is drawn around you, in chunks — 8, 14 (the default), 20, 28 or 32. At 32 you can see roughly half a kilometre in every direction, which is the setting to reach for when you want to judge a build against the landscape around it, or line up something that spans more ground than one screen. Terrain fills in from wherever you're looking first, so the view ahead of the camera is ready before the view behind it.

The high settings ask a lot of your machine's memory rather than its GPU, so they suit a desktop with plenty of it. Distant terrain doesn't draw the caves buried inside it — the parts of the world you couldn't see from the surface anyway — and it all comes back the moment you head underground. The memory meter at the right-hand end of the status bar tracks the cost as you raise it: hover it for the numbers, and it shows them on its own once memory runs high. If it climbs far enough to risk the tab reloading, Quarry lowers the view distance itself and tells you it has; raise it back once memory frees up. On a large streamed world, raising the setting streams the wider ring in straight away rather than waiting for you to fly somewhere.

Quality (Low / Medium / High) trades GPU cost for fidelity in Vibrant Visuals. Higher tiers add atmospheric sky scattering (a richer, deeper sky with a warm haze around the sun), subsurface scattering that makes backlit leaves and grass glow as light passes through them, shallow-water glow, edge anti-aliasing (multisampling — off on Low, 2× on Medium, 4× on High — so block edges and thin lines stop stair-stepping), and, on High, god-ray light shafts where terrain blocks the sun plus refractive water that bends the view of the bottom with the waves. It's separate from the Resolution control, which only changes how sharp the image is rendered — so you can keep crisp pixels on a lower quality tier, or full effects at a reduced resolution, whichever your machine prefers. Defaults to Medium.

Upscaling decides how that reduced-resolution Vibrant Visuals image is enlarged back to fill the window (it only matters when Resolution is below 100%). High-quality uses AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0 — an edge-adaptive upscale with contrast-aware sharpening that gives noticeably crisper edges than the simpler Bicubic filter, at the same render cost. Auto (the default) picks High-quality on a GPU that can handle it and falls back to Bicubic on weaker or software-rendered hardware. Your choice is remembered between sessions.

Animate textures (on by default) plays Minecraft's flipbook textures — lava, fire, water, magma, sea lanterns, prismarine, portals, campfires, lanterns and more — instead of showing a single frozen frame. Turn it off to freeze every texture (handy for saving battery on a laptop, since animation redraws the viewport continuously). It applies in both rendering modes; in Vibrant Visuals the water surface keeps its own animated waves.

Vary block textures (on by default) turns individual blocks a random way, so a large flat area stops reading as one texture stamped in a grid. It is what Minecraft itself does, on the same blocks the game does it to — grass, dirt, podzol, mycelium, rooted dirt, dirt paths, sand and red sand, stone, deepslate, sculk, bedrock, netherrack, concrete powder and lily pads — using the game's own rule for which way each block faces, so a field breaks up the way Minecraft's does rather than just looking scrambled. Nothing about the world changes, only how it is drawn; turning it off gives every block the same fixed orientation. It costs nothing to render, and applies in both rendering modes.

Time of day (and the Time scrubber beside it) now applies in both rendering modes. In Fast mode it dims the world the way Minecraft does: sky light falls to a quarter of its strength at night, so open ground goes moonlit while a torch-lit room stays exactly as bright as its torches make it, and the sky and horizon haze darken with it. It is instant on a world of any size — nothing is rebuilt, only the meaning of "sky light 15" changes. Dawn and dusk bring the warm band along the horizon where the sun is going down (or coming up), fading back to plain blue as the day settles — the same colours Minecraft draws. Vibrant Visuals uses the same clock for its sun, shadows and sky.

Fullbright (off by default) lights every block evenly, ignoring where the light actually falls. With it off, Fast mode shades the world the way Minecraft does: sunlight reaches what the sky can see, torches, lanterns and glowstone light what's around them, and a cave or a sealed room is dark until you light it. Turn Fullbright on to see inside an unlit build without filling it with torches — it changes only what you see, never the world, and it switches instantly however large the world is. It brings the daytime sky back while it's on, so an evenly lit world doesn't sit against a midnight horizon; your place on the clock is kept, and returns the moment you switch Fullbright off. Vibrant Visuals lights the world with its own sun and shadows, so the toggle doesn't apply there.

If an imported world ships a resource pack with Vibrant-Visuals PBR data (texture_set files defining metalness/emissive/roughness/subsurface maps and normal maps), its custom blocks and retextures render with that authored material in Vibrant Visuals — emissive blocks glow, metals reflect, foliage scatters light, and normal maps add surface relief (Medium quality and up). Nothing is written back into the world; this is preview-only and export stays byte-for-byte.

When the camera moves below a water surface — flying, walking, or inside a waterlogged block — the view fogs and tints a deep blue with short visibility, like being underwater in Minecraft. It clears the moment you surface. This works in both Fast and Vibrant Visuals modes.

World map and minimap

Press N — or the ⤢ button on the navigator — to open a top-down map of the whole world: coastlines, biomes, mountains, and everything you've built. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, and click anywhere to fly straight there. The read-out under the map shows the coordinates and chunk under your cursor, and the picker at the top switches between the Overworld, the Nether and the End.

The map opens straight away even on a very large world, because it starts from information Minecraft already stores for every chunk — the surface height and the biome — instead of loading the world's blocks. That first pass gives you biome colours and shaded relief, so oceans, mountains and forests read immediately. Wherever you zoom in, the map then fills in the real colour of the block on top of each column, so your builds appear in the materials you used. The Terrain / Blocks toggle picks which of the two you want; zoomed far out the map always uses the fast one, since individual blocks would be smaller than a pixel anyway.

Chunks you've edited are tinted amber so you can find your work in a big imported world. (In a world you generated or built from scratch every chunk counts as edited, so the highlight switches itself off rather than covering everything.)

On a streamed world the whole-world view takes a while to build the first time, and a bar along the bottom of the navigator tracks it. You can close the world whenever you like: the map is saved as it goes and picks up where it left off next time you open that world.

The navigator is the same map in miniature, in the top-right corner: north-up, with a cone showing which way you're facing, your current selection, and — during a collaboration session — where everyone else is. Its rim doubles as the compass, so clicking N / E / S / W turns you that way.

Click the map to hop somewhere nearby. Hover it to reveal its buttons: ✕ to hide it, ⤢ for the full world map, ⊤ for a top-down view, ⊡ to frame your selection (or re-centre the view if you haven't got one), and + / − to zoom. Right-click it for the same options plus Small / Large — it starts small on short screens and large on tall ones, and remembers whichever you pick.

To hide or restore it: Shift+N, the Navigator checkbox in View & Rendering, or the command palette.

The map only ever reads your world; it never changes it, and it has no effect on what gets exported.