Billy Oatmeal
Comments
@Micheal harcrow, I saw in one of the realms reports that there is a different 'issue' in bedrock affecting render and that it was listed as a priority of 'Important' with someone assigned. Don't give your hopes up.
Just to follow up, I went through with finding a server hosting service to run a server and the settings for the render distance works fine. Every adjustment I made to render distance in the 'server.properties' file worked as expected and I can definitely confirm my previous realms was set at 9 for the render distance. This was done with a previously older world from 1.17.1 that had been upgraded to 1.18. (Same world I used on Realms)
I will note, that after some research, that some server hosts automatically also limit render distance themselves. It sometimes will be out of the user's control or with a hard to find setting within their website that automatically changes the 'server.properties' back to a preset setting before launching a server, so anybody having this issue outside of realms, should definitely check with their server host first, particularly the hosts who don't give you much control over your settings as a lower render distance may be forced by them.
Hope this helps
I don't understand why they would do this to us, but according to above linked bug report the other day, A [Mojang] Cullen (in the comments) said Java Realms render distance is set to 9 which is just so incredibly low it's unplayable, so possibly we were just getting some kind of advantage of the bug mentioned by [Helper] ampolive earlier in the comments here that has been fixed.
So from what I'm gathering this isn't a bug and is intentional, so I guess I'm going server host shopping because this is outright unplayable in this condition. You can't see anything at such a low render distance, especially considering this whole update is about big mountains and caves. You literally can't even see the other side of an average cavern underground, nor see the top of a mountain while standing at the bottom of it. I assumed I was getting about 12 on the realms before the update and wasn't particularly happy about that but I understand keeping the servers cost efficient so I dealt with it, but was surprised it wasn't 16 which was the old 'default' before Realms was introduced.
Please consider bumping this up to a more playable render distance, this absolutely affects gameplay big time.
Also, can confirm, loaded up same world on realms from before 1.18 and suddenly can't see as far as before the update. It was borderline not enough before, but now it's just unplayable. I certainly do hope it's a bug and not the new norm.
I can report that this also happened to me while trying to log in MY realms. Whenever I join everybody on the server gets kicked and it states 'Kicked By An Operator'. However when just my friend plays, he is fine and does not get kicked. I am also OP of the server.
@Jon-Jacob you could never change the render distance on Realms yourself. That is set by the Realms Server, you would have to run your own server to change your render distance. That is intentional.