Do blocks that you cant see (excluding spawners) make minecraft run slower?

I ask because I was going to make a multi-layered arena ( About 45 X 60 X 192 blocks big).It is going to be from bedrock to the sky, and I will have many many stages stacked on top of each other. So from the side it would look like this

_____________

I - - - - - - - - - - I -> lvl 0

I - - - - - - - - - - I -> lvl 1

I - - - - - - - - - - I -> lvl 2

I - - - - - - - - - - I -> lvl 3

I - - - - - - - - - - I -> lvl 4

I - - - - - - - - - - I

When you are on lvl 2(you cant see lvls 0 and 4). Will my computer still process lvls 0 and 4? Thanks for your time.

What I do is when you have the minecraft client open, go to Options>Video Settings> Graphics: Fast or Fancy> Fast

Transparent blocks like leaves become solid and It reduces lag. You can even do this while playing, its as simple as hitting ESC.

i think what he means is blocks that are not in ur line of sight. im not familier with minecraft rendering so i cant provide the answer but im sure someone out there can!

The mob spawners are a transparent block on both fast & fancy, the also emit a "spark" type of a animation , what he wants to know if those blocks cause lag in, or out of sight

as for if it makes it slower or not i dont know, but my understanding is that all blocks in the area you are in are there, like if you warp some where and you can see the chunks fill in around you, it is all the blocks in that chunk, bedrock to sky, loading (i dont know if chunk is the right word or not). in other words, all of the tower is being processed if it is within the same chunk wether you see it or not

this is my understanding of it, and it may be wrong, so...

EDIT: going by the next couple posts, i am incorrect with what i have said here, please ignore, and have a nice day...or night... whatever

Any blocks that you cannot see are not rendered. This is true for all popular games, since they use either DirectX or OpenGL.

Just because the items are not rendered does not mean that they aren't calculated. Some calculations are done by your graphics card, as it handles floating point numbers very well (physics). CPUs are notoriously bad at physics calculations in comparison to a graphics card.

Rabid Crab is very correct.. take a look at your video settings, there is an option under OpenGL to render or not render blocks outside the viewing area. However, any parameters that depend on say for example player range, like spawners, crop growth etc etc are calculations made by the world simulation, not by your client that is running minecraft.

These placed blocks are calculated by the world, and not by any condition of your computer. Once you place a block, say a wheat farm.. it is now part of the world and it will run its algorithm at the prescribed rate (ticks) , say, "is there anyone around to meet the condition for my growth" if yes it will grow, if no it will not. Something to consider when building your arena too, remember that minetown is a constantly simulated world, even when you are not logged in.

This is all in the design of minecraft so the difference is negligible in terms of performance, especially client side. And minetown is a large world with a large world to simulate and calculate.

In my experience it is not the number of visible blocks but the activity that may be going on where I see client side slow downs. A mob trap with hundreds of skele in a confined space will cause slowdowns as I pan my mouse over to one punch them into a rain of green orbs, arrows and humeri (yes, plural for humerus).

If any of this sounds not right.. then feel free to call B.S. it is simply my understanding of how the updating works in MC.

Good luck with your build.

In minecraft all the blocks are there as long as they are within rendering distance, within (x) number chunks radius are always generated around you. Because the game renders in chunks of 16x16x256, the entire chunk is rendered as long as it's close enough, not sections of it. Because of this the game uses only your X and Z (Left/right and forward/backward) coordinates to determine what chunks to render.

The blocks render regardless of visibility so long as they are within your render distance, in addition, the chunks generate 65,536 blocks whether or not they are solid blocks, as air aka sky blocks occupy all the seemingly empty space that we walk around it.

Easy version:

As long as your tower isn't vastly wide or long, the entire tower would render because the height isnt limited by your render distance. So the sky level blocks would be rendered even if you were on bedrock level. Also, the number of visible blocks in a chunk doesn't affect performance because visible blocks simply replace invisible blocks, making the block count in a chunk the same no matter what.

I ask because it seems as though you know a lot more about this than I do,

In your personal opinion, do you believe that the structure I am trying to build will be too heavy on performance for a mac book pro 13" i7?

In short, No.

No structure, regardless of what kind of blocks are used, would slowdown a computer. What would cause slowdowns is if other elements were at play, such as TNT explosions, massive mob spawning, ect. Non block elements basically are what cause slowdowns.

I'll go ahead and ask this now, do your arenas use spawners as part of the design? I'm not asking because of potential slowdowns but because the design is going to limit the number of mobs that could be spawned.