nikitagk22/bobby-share

Bobby Share is a mod for Minecraft, built for the Fabric mod loader, that works alongside another popular mod called Bobby. Bobby lets players see further than the server normally allows by saving a local copy of nearby chunks of the world on their own computer, but normally you have to physically walk through an area first before it gets cached. Bobby Share removes that requirement by having the server send chunk data straight to your client the moment you need it. When you join a server or move into a new area, your game checks whether it already has that chunk saved locally. If not, it quietly asks the server for it. The server then prepares the chunk in the background, strips out details that do not matter for rendering, like structures, entity behavior data, and certain terrain shaping information, and sends a much smaller version back to your client, which saves it so you can instantly see far beyond the server's own render distance. The mod is built with larger servers in mind. It keeps a cache of recently requested chunks in server memory so popular areas do not need to be reloaded from disk every time, and it limits how many chunk requests each player can make in quick succession, so a player moving unusually fast or a misbehaving bot cannot overwhelm the server. Because the heavy data is stripped out before sending, the amount of information transferred is typically reduced by fifty to eighty percent, and all the chunk loading work happens off the game's main thread so it should not cause stutters or slowdowns for anyone on the server. Server operators can adjust settings like request limits, cache size, and which dimensions are excluded from chunk streaming through a configuration file, and reload those changes with a command without restarting the server. To install it, you place the compiled files in the mods folder on both the client and server, though the original Bobby mod itself only needs to be installed on the client side. Building it from source requires Java 21 and a single Gradle command. The project is released under the MIT license, so it is free to use, modify, and share, including commercially, as long as the copyright notice is kept.