Mojang has released Minecraft 26.3 Snapshot 9, and it arrived a day ahead of its scheduled date, PCGamesN reports. The headline addition is a set of controls that let Realm owners configure render and simulation distances for their worlds directly, rather than accepting a fixed value.
The new sliders let an owner raise the distance at which chunks are drawn for players on their server. PCGamesN frames the change as most useful to owners running hardware that can absorb the extra load, since a longer render distance costs performance in exchange for visible range.
What the render controls change
Beyond the increase in visible scale, the practical effect is on planning. Being able to see more of the map at once lets players work out where to travel and where to mine before setting off, which is a different kind of benefit from the purely cosmetic one. Separating render distance from simulation distance also means an owner can extend what players can see without extending the area the server has to keep active, which is the more expensive half of the equation.
Bug fixes
The snapshot also closes a set of bugs. Endermen that ate chorus fruit could be teleported into dangerous places, foxes holding shelf mushrooms had clipping problems, and the game could crash during the loading screen. All three are fixed in Snapshot 9, according to PCGamesN, alongside a wider set of changes listed in Mojang's own notes.
Snapshots remain a Java Edition feature. Installing this one means opening the Minecraft launcher and enabling snapshots from the Installations tab; players who hit problems after updating can file reports through the Minecraft issue tracker. As with any pre-release build, backing up a world before loading it into a snapshot is the standard precaution, since these versions are explicitly test builds rather than finished releases.
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