I am working on a voxel game similar to Minecraft. The goal would be to handle more entities but also offer a more immersive experience by the fact that the player does not need to worry about loading chunks.
What is a way to handle unloaded entities? I plan to keep chunks near the player “awake” and performing a full simulation. However, I cannot do this for distant chunks, it would require too much computing power.
I was thinking about discretizing some of the entity behavior, but this appears to become very complicated once there are too many possible interactions. Imagine a furnace processing ores, which in turn go into a chest, and a golem moves items from that chest into some other container.
The simulation could probably be simplified the more distant from the player it is, but obviously I want to avoid anything that could lead to item duplication.
Are there any elegant solutions to this problem?