How Hydro is set up.
Render distance, datapacks, custom recipes and the performance tuning behind them — the stuff you would otherwise have to ask about in Discord, on one page.
The things everyone should know.
/trigger CustomModelData set <id>; /trigger hat wears anything.
Quality of life only. Never gameplay-altering.
All enabled on the live world. Most come from vanillatweaks.net; a handful are ours or from Modrinth. Redstone, farms and mob mechanics stay exactly as Mojang shipped them.
The Vanilla Tweaks crafting-tweaks bundle and Hydro's three recipe packs only add recipes — they are all in the next section.
Still vanilla crafting, just a bit more convenient.
A few extra recipes on top of the vanilla ones, all unlocked in your recipe book from your first join. Hover a slot to see the item. Each card is one example — More Stairs applies to every stair, Universal Dyeing to terracotta, glass, panes, concrete powder and candles, Back to Blocks to every slab and stair.
4 chunks ticked, 48 chunks visible.
Hydro keeps its ticking radius tight so 80 players can share one long-term world at 20 TPS — and uses BetterView to still show you the world all the way to the horizon.
| Setting | Hydro | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Sent to you | 48 BetterView | Chunks streamed to your client. Everything past 4 is read straight from disk — view-only, no entities, no ticking, no cost to TPS. Set your render distance to 48 to use it all. |
| Simulation distance | 6 → 4–8 | Where mobs move, crops grow and redstone runs. ServerCore steps it up or down live. |
| View distance | 4 (vanilla) | The vanilla radius the server actually loads and ticks for you. Fixed at 4. |
| Even further | Voxy | The modpack ships Voxy, which keeps a lightweight copy of every chunk you have ever seen and renders it beyond the server's 48 — whole continents, at almost no FPS cost. |
Each square is a chunk. Farms and redstone only run in the pink and orange area; the blue area is scenery that costs the server nothing.
ServerCore, tuned for farms.
ServerCore trades distance for stability automatically (target 40 MSPT, checked every 15 s). The numbers below are what it works with, plus the mob and villager rules that matter for technical play.
Dynamic settings| Setting | Start | Range |
|---|---|---|
| Chunk tick distance | 6 | 6 – 8 |
| Mob cap | 50 % | 50 – 75 % |
| Simulation distance | 6 | 4 – 8 |
| View distance | 4 | fixed |
One step (1 chunk / 5 %) per 15 s, in that order. Random ticks are never distance-limited, so crops and leaves behave like vanilla.
Mob caps — per player| Category | Hydro | Vanilla | After 50–75 % |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monsters | 70 | 70 | 35 – 52 |
| Animals | 15 | 10 | 7 – 11 |
| Water creatures | 20 | 5 | 10 – 15 |
| Axolotls & glow squid | 10 | 5 | 5 – 7 |
| Bats / fish | 15 | 15 / 20 | 7 – 11 |
Every cap is yours alone (Per Player Spawns). Spawners, zombie reinforcements and portal piglins ignore it (+32 each). Wandering traders roll per player too.
Villagers & breeding- Villagers in a 1×1 box run their AI every 6 s instead of every tick. Trading halls work, they just think slower.
- Beyond 16 blocks a villager ticks once a second (full tick every 30 s); panicking villagers always tick, so raids and iron farms are fine.
- Breeding caps: 32 villagers within 92 blocks, 64 animals of one type within 64, 32 happy ghasts within 64.
Entity activation range- Far from players entities tick once per second: monsters 32 blocks (raiders, ghasts, phantoms 48), other mobs 24, animals and villagers 16.
- Always ticked: every boat and minecart, hopper minecarts, TNT, ghasts, wardens. Anything falling, burning or hurt stays active.
- Vertical range and tick-skipping are off — the farm-safe choices. XP orbs merge (Clumps); items merge at the vanilla 0.5 blocks.
Small conveniences worth knowing about.
Server-side mods that change what you can do, never how survival works. Full list with versions on the Server Mods page.
Signs & item framesRight-click through a sign or frame to the container behind it; shift + right-click to use the frame itself. Amethyst shard or sneak + empty-hand click makes a frame invisible. Broken signs keep their text (craft to wipe); right-click a sign with signs in hand to copy it.
MiniHUD & LitematicaServux sends structure bounding boxes and HUD data to MiniHUD; Syncmatica shares litematics through the server. The seed is not shared.
Voice chat & BedrockSimple Voice Chat proximity voice with groups (client mod in the modpack). Bedrock players join the same address through Geyser.
Anti-X-ray & loggingOres are hidden until exposed in the Overworld and Nether. Ledger records every block and container change, so griefing gets rolled back.
First joinNew players get a small starter kit, and every recipe is already unlocked in the recipe book.
The basicsDifficulty Hard. 80 slots. No spawn protection. Resource pack required. Chat is unsigned (No Chat Reports).