This should be a pretty easy question to answer, and I'm not looking for how to store the voxels data wise, I'm looking for the theory. Currently, my voxel engine has no global list of tiles. Each chunk has it's own list, and its hard to do things like collision detection or anything that may use tiles that are outside of its own chunk. I recently worked on procedural terrain with a non voxel engine. Now, I want to start using heightmaps in my voxel engine. But, I have a problem. If each chunk has its own list, then it will be pretty difficult to implement the heightmaps.

My real question is, is should I store a global list of voxels independent of the chunks? And then I can just easily perform collision detection and terrain generation. However, it would probably be harder to do things such as frustum culling.

So how should I store them?