Beacon material should influence beacon radius + chunk loading

:Magic:[Magic]:Magic:

I assume someone else has said this before because it feels like such an obvious change but it irritates me that iron blocks have the exact same effects on a beacons as netherite does. My suggestion is that the blocks that you make the beacon out of act as a modifier to the radius. each block has an assigned value which is added up to create to additional modifying value. each activated beacon has a base line modifier of x1 with the additional modifying value being added to that base line modifier to form the total modification value. this is then multiplied against the the beacons already existing in game block radius range based on beacon level (lvl 1 is 20, lvl 2 is 30, lvl 3 is 40, and lvl 4 is 50).

ergo the sum is:

total beacon range = beacon lvl range * (1 + additional modifying value)

my suggested modifying values of each blocks are 0 for iron blocks as this is the cheapest and shouldn't alter the level radius at all, 0.0141 for gold blocks, 0.0282 for emerald blocks, 0.0422 for diamond blocks, and 0.0563 for netherite blocks.

This would mean that the minimum beacon radius would be 20 blocks for a level 1 beacon made entirely of iron blocks (20*(1+0) = 20) and the maximum block radius would be 512 blocks for a level 4 beacon made entirely of netherite blocks (50*(1+9.2332) = 511.66). This is due to 512 blocks being the max render distance radius.

This would be a good addition to the game as it gives players incentive to make beacons out of rarer materials instead of just building an iron farm and waiting. As well as this, it fixes an issue ive had with the game which is that i tend to build in an area wider than 50 blocks and i dont want to kill the wither 20 times to give me speed boost across my whole base.

this also allows people to make very specific beacon ranges as long as they dont mind doing some slightly trickier maths.

additionally I think that beacons should act as chunk loader for the chunk they are built on with a 1 chunk radius. this ensures that beacon effects will last even if the players simulation distance is lower than their distance for a beacon. I understand this can cause lag issues especially with servers but thats can be fixed with limiting the number of active beacons per world. This should be an optional setting in the settings menu which allows you to set the maximum number of beacons. i dont know much about the exact relation between chunk loading and lag so ill let someone smarter than me figure that out.

I feel like this wont be a massive problem for players as it is an optional setting AND the new mechanic would allow for people to build less beacons to get the effect range they desire.

Posted Dec 1, 2025, 4:15 AM UTC

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