[2021] request for a chunk based world gen.

That's how it used to be. In the past the world was generated on the fly as you explored. Problem was that it had a really huge impact on performance. So with a17, it was changed to the way it is now.

And lets be clear here. This is a game still being developed. The current generation process is a work in progress, and is currently incomplete and not well optimized. The plan is for it to take about 1 minute per 1k² on min spec hardware. So an 8k map will take about 8 minutes to create on a low-end system.
Currently it's about 20 minutes on recommended spec systems, and around an hour on min spec.

Originally posted by Capt. Q. Schwartz:

Originally posted by SylenThunder: The plan is for it to take about 1 minute per 1k² on min spec hardware. So an 8k map will take about 8 minutes to create on a low-end system.

If the goal is 8 mins for an 8k map (64k²), wouldn't the necessary generation be 8k² per minute?

The current default map sizes are 4k, and 8k. So the current 4k map will be 4 minutes to create, and 8k will be 8 minutes to create. Though there has been some discussion on changing the default map sizes to 6k and 10k.

Please don't confuse the situation. It's pretty basic.