Render distance of partially transparent blocks is about half of render distance setting

Please provide the actual numbers. What is your maximum render distance? How far away are flowers and mobs disappearing?

Entities do have their own render distance limitation of around 70 blocks, which cannot be changed.

My render distance is 22 chunks which is the max. Things starts disappearing 165 blocks

Simulation distance chunks is 10 max

Oh my bad I think it's 161 or 160 blocks away from me when things start disappearing 

Thank you for your report!

However, this issue has been temporarily closed as Awaiting Response.

Is this still an issue in the latest version? If yes, can you please add it to the affected versions (or mention it if you are not the reporter)?

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Behavior still occurs. I have updated the report to clarify.

The reported behavior creates a special problem with iron bars in the end, which has been tracked separately at MCPE-30028.

For some reason the behavior applies to powder snow too, even though powder snow is not partially transparent. (MCPE-127565)

The same blocks that stop rendering at 1/2 of render distance on land stop rendering underwater when their chunk is 32 blocks from the player. (MCPE-34794)

Isn't this intended as a way of saving resources? Like a LOD type system where unimportant objects such as grass are unrendered and animated textures stop being animated. I agree that it is quite jarring and blocks such as powdered snow should not be unrendered but the feature itself isn't a bug

This issue also applies to custom blocks (see e.g. MCPE-140364), which suggests to me it may actually be triggered by the "render_method": "alpha_test" inside "material_instances".

I agree the feature itself makes sense for optimization for some blocks like grass and flowers, but I think it does not make sense for it to be based on simplistic criteria (render distance + render method). It ought to have a minimum threshold (like entities do) so things don't disappear too close on low-end devices or for users using low render distance to get better performance. For example, on my iPhone I can set render distance as low as 6 chunks, and that makes affected blocks disappear when > 48 blocks away. It might be even better to have it be adjustable separate to some extent from render distance.

It also does not make much sense for light-emitting blocks like fire and glow lichen, because you can see the light from far away but not the source. And for a block like lily pads, not being able to see it from high up in the air before you jump could mean you die from falling instead of landing safely in the water.

Over 12 chunk render distance this doesn't occur in the nether. Seems weird for specifically it working fine in the nether but the lower render distance underwater having sea grass and other transparent blocks disappearing as if the render distance slider was set to 4

The behavior is the same in the nether, but the nether fog makes it impossible to test anything higher than 12 chunk render distance because you can only see about 100 blocks in the least foggy biomes. I think the nether may also have its own render distance limit of 12 chunks, meaning a higher setting doesn't let you see any farther than 12 chunks even if you remove the fog. The affected blocks should still disappear at 1/2 of whatever you set your render distance to.

Well my bad for taking it as a bug but it looks weird.. Minecraft Console edition doesn't make grass or flowers disappear. 

Nicolas crawford: the report is still open, confirmed, and tracked internally by Mojang, so we just have to wait and see how they handle it. They might say it's all working as intended, they might adjust the threshold distance, they might tweak which blocks are affected, they might eliminate it entirely, or do something totally different. It wasn't wrong for you to report the issue. I just took the opportunity to investigate and try to bring out the full scope of how it's currently working.

I'd say if this issue would be addressed the way I would prefer it to is to add a sort of "foliage distance%" slider like how Java has a entity distance% slider and bedrock used to have one for particles but was mysteriously removed

Affects 1.17.40.20

With mipmaps set to 4, compared to 0, leaves loose transparency in a similar manner at a shorter distance. Modded shaders seam to be able to resolve both leave transparency issues. At one point I seem to have somehow accidentally disabled the non-mip related loss of transparency without shaders active by toggling though shaders... this doesn't get rid of the mipmap loss of transparency but that is more likely caused by no alpha channel being mipped, with the leaves texture using a all or nothing method of transparency. I don't know how shaders allow transparency though mips, perhaps by blending the mip levels?