Before I go too far down a rat hole I figured I would ask some questions.

 

What I am looking to do is render client side effects as blocks.  These "phantom" blocks could occur anywhere in the world, x, y, or z.  These blocks do not exist in a chunk and are not accessible using the standard world.getBlock()/world.getBlockState().  In some cases they will be generated on the fly based on criteria.  State does not have to be persisted between world restarts.  These blocks would have no collision box as they are just visual effects.  Yada yada yada...

 

So, my questions...

 

• How should I go about integrating my phantom block rendering into the Minecraft rendering system?  I have Googled examples of what others have done and some of them listen for rendering events in order to do rendering.  Seems straight forward if it is the right approach.
  
• What I am not sure about is clipping - will my blocks be properly clipped if they happen to be behind other blocks or blocks that have transparency (leaf blocks)?
  

 

Thanks!

Builders Wand from Extra Utilities (i think) achieves something similiar. Download the mod and decompile it to check it's code. Note that Extra Utilities is not open source so you cannot distribute the code without the author's permission

 

Thanks for the tip.  I will take a look and get some ideas.