@Rustic

The draw distances (camera height and plane) I work with are all only camera related:
- The distance (circle) at what settlement/army icons and names are fading out. Because this is a distance from the camera it is affected by tilt. With my mod all settlement names stay on screen at top-down view, but you can see them fade out in the distance when the camera is tilted.
- The camera height at which the map switches to a "simpler representation" without weather effects and different shadows and then with or without parchment overlay. My camera mod goes right from full view into camera view.
- The distance (aka plane) at which the map is drawn. This is what makes the circular view you see in my first screenshot (with fog of war disabled). If I increased this then the map would stick out of the fog of war at certain zoom levels. And because this defines the plane (height) at which the map resides the size of the circle's size changes. Actually there are two such planes, one "near" and one "far", I only modify the "far" one to manage zooming all the way out.

What you describe seems to be another circular distance that my mod has no control over. There are at least two of these: one for level of detail at the far distance (horizon when you tilt the camera) and one that changes shadows. The former is hidden away by tilt and ground fog and one reason why I had to fine-tune when to lift the fog and when to keep it.

The latter seems to be somewhat broken and usually also hidden partially by fog. What happens is that a present shadow (peaks, trees) vanishes towards the lower screen border when you zoom out while a new shadow overlay appears from the upper screen border. The more you zoom out the more this happens. But this seems to be at least a partial bug, because you can temporarily fix it by switching to the parchment map view and then zooming back in. Curiously the same can happen with Ogre camps (icons/text).

My mod has no control over these shadows other than it removing ground fog at a certain camera height. Lighting and weather mods might affect these, though. There also seems to be a LOD (level of detail) step for both map details and shadows that switches shortly before my mod activates the archment map. Usually these things are hidden by narrow camera field of view and low camera height (cannot zoom out as far). I could activate the parchment map a bit earlier, though.