I figured this would be a frequent topic, but I don't see a definitive answer below.

Has there ever been an attempt at increasing the draw distance in this? Any mods or hacks for it? It's crazy how hard to find any information about this series is online.

That's because the internet was hardly a thing when these games came out and quickly got burried by newer titles later on. Also modding dosgames is a rarity.

You could try modding the .exe with something like Cheat Engine, but not knowing where to look is like a finding needle in a haystack.

Well, there are plenty of games of this era that still get a lot of Internet talk. Magic Carpet as a whole is an underrated, under-discussed series, IMO.

Also, I don't know if it's gonna be as easy as changing a memory value somewhere. Here's hoping it is, but if that's the case I haven't found any references to it anywhere on the Internet and it's the most obvious issue when playing the game today, so you'd think there'd be more info about it out there.

For the record, I stumbled upon this from Glenn Corpes, who coded the engine:

http://glenncorpes.blogspot.com/2011/06/magic-carpet-re-release.html

It explains why the draw distance is the way it is and claims "It would be trivial to fix with access to the source code, probably almost impossible without it".

Haven't found anybody who tried, though.

From the looks of it, it seems deeply embedded in the code and probably not fixable with a simple hexeditor change.

Might as well try to remake the game with Unreal Engine 5 or whatever.