View distance vs simulation distance

What view distance controls

On a Paper server, view-distance controls how much world data the server sends to a player, measured as a chunk radius around that player. A value of 10 means the server can send chunks up to 10 chunks outward in each direction, subject to the player's own client settings.

Increasing it lets players see farther, but also means more chunks may need to be loaded, generated, tracked, and transmitted as players move.

What simulation distance controls

simulation-distance controls the radius in which living entities are updated by the server. Outside that simulation radius, entities are not actively ticked in the same way. Paper's current server-properties reference allows values from 3 through 32 and defaults to 10.

That makes simulation distance especially relevant to farms, mobs, villagers, redstone-adjacent gameplay, and other systems that depend on active server ticks rather than just seeing terrain.

Why the two settings affect performance differently

View distance can increase chunk loading, generation, memory use, and network traffic. Simulation distance adds active game work because more nearby entities and systems remain inside the simulation area.

That is why a server can use a larger view distance than simulation distance: players can still see farther-away terrain while the server limits how much of that area is fully active.

Important: there is no single best pair of values for every server. Player count, exploration speed, world generation, plugins, mods, farms, CPU performance, and memory all matter.

How to choose sensible values

Start from conservative values and change one setting at a time. For a small survival server, keeping simulation distance below or equal to view distance is a useful starting pattern. If players care more about scenery than distant mob or farm activity, increasing view distance first is usually the less gameplay-invasive experiment.

• Watch tick health while several players are spread out.
• Test farms and mob behavior after changing simulation distance.
• Test fresh exploration, because generating new chunks can cost more than revisiting existing terrain.
• Do not assume a value that works with two players will behave the same with ten.

Paper also allows per-world overrides through its Spigot-compatible configuration, so advanced servers can tune worlds differently instead of forcing one value everywhere.

Configure these settings on Exaltry

Exaltry's configurator lets you choose gameplay and server settings alongside RAM and server software. Start with a reasonable configuration, then tune from measured behavior instead of paying for resources you do not need.