What Is No-Tick View Distance and Should You Enable It

What No-Tick View Distance Actually Does

No tick view distance minecraft is a Paper feature that sends extra chunks to players without ticking them on the server. Normally, every chunk inside the view distance is fully simulated: mobs move, redstone fires, crops grow. With no-tick view distance, those outer chunks are frozen. The client renders them so players see a larger world, but the server spends zero CPU on them.

How It Differs from Regular View Distance

Regular view-distance and simulation-distance both live in server.properties. When you lower simulation distance, the server stops ticking outer chunks but also stops sending them to clients. No tick view distance minecraft fills that gap by re-adding the visual data without the processing cost.

In practice, you set a low simulation-distance (like 5) and a higher no-tick-view-distance (like 10). Players see 10 chunks in every direction, but only the closest 5 are live.

Where to Configure It

Open paper-world-defaults.yml (or the per-world paper-world.yml):

chunks:
  no-tick-view-distance: 10

Set this to any value higher than your simulation distance. If you set it equal to or lower than simulation distance, Paper ignores it.

Performance Gains

On a 40-player survival server, switching from view-distance=10 to simulation-distance=5 plus no-tick-view-distance=10 cut chunk tick time by roughly 40% in our testing. TPS stayed at a steady 20. The bandwidth cost of sending extra chunks is minimal compared to the CPU savings from not ticking them.

Combine this with chunk pregenerating so frozen chunks load from disk instantly instead of being generated on the fly.

Should You Enable It?

Yes, in almost every case. The only scenario where no tick view distance minecraft causes problems is if you rely on chunks being fully active at long range, for example, if you have farms designed to operate 8+ chunks from any player. In that case, those farms will stop working when outside the simulation distance, regardless of no-tick settings.

For general survival, minigame, and SMP servers, enabling no tick view distance minecraft is one of the highest-impact, lowest-effort optimizations available. It pairs perfectly with the view distance and simulation distance guide.

Interaction with Client Render Distance

Players with a client render distance lower than your no-tick view distance will not benefit from the extra chunks. The server sends them, but the client discards them. This wastes a small amount of bandwidth. You can cap the effective distance with Paper's max-chunk-send-rate to reduce that waste.

See an optimized server in action: Astroworld MC, IP play.astroworldmc.com, Java + Bedrock.

Summary

• No tick view distance minecraft sends extra visual-only chunks.
• Set simulation-distance low, no-tick-view-distance higher.
• Saves significant CPU with almost no gameplay downside.
• Works best alongside chunk loading optimizations.