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Important: Server Lag issue

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Dear all,
Since Friday last week (9th March) we have a massive lag issue. Normally we have a TPS (ticks per second) around 19 (max is 20) and right now, the TPS is degrading down to 11 during the course of the day. The only thing that I could identify is that the issue is located in the Kingdom world.
I did some initial testing but could not find what is causing it in detail. I would like to encourage all of you to check for the following items:

  • Large surface tiled with slabs: Those cause spawn-attempts that are then cancelled
  • Large surfaces of Ice in winter biomes that have torches on them: The ice melts and re-freezes permanently
  • Automated farms: If you have a mob farm where mobs automatically are killed, there needs to be a switch that can disable mob spawning/killing. The killing method here does not matter (falling, fire, overcrowding). It has to be able to be disabled and when you are not there, it should not operate. If other people than the lot owner goes to the lot, they have to switch it on to operate it.
  • Same goes about observer-based cane farms. If you cannot switch off the farming, it’s not allowed.
  • Large water flow areas / cascades should not exist.
  • Please also look for more info on the “Lag” page.

Please consider the following: I have considerably invested in the server hardware and every 2 years spend double the monthly rate to migrate to a stronger system that should support 50+ users at the same time. On the other side, it’s extremely hard and dozens of hours of work for me to identify causes of lag. If at the same time users operate systems that essentially turn the survival principles of the server into a creative environment because they harvest goods at a rate that overcompensates their consumption by dimensions, it’s simply not lining up anymore.

So please, keep your farms & anti-mob measures at scale for personal use (!) and check whatever you did since Friday so we can stop the lag. I don’t want to start test-resetting kingdom lots to find the issue.

Darklands Reset Update

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Looking at the latest snapshots and the dramatic changes in the underwater landscape with Ravines, Ruins and caves, I have decided that we will, with 100% certainty, reset the darklands after the next version upgrade.

Ideally, of course, we would do this at the same time when the server gets upgraded. I do not know how long it will be until the new version will be ready, there are still several announced features missing in the latest snapshots. It can be well 1 or even 2 months until then. However I want to give everyone enough time to salvage their stuff from the darklands, so there is the announcement that there will be a reset. In the hopes that we will be ready to erase the current darklands once the new version comes out, please go ahead and clean out your stuff. Please note that this is not a permission for griefing what was built by individuals. If stuff is used by the community, please make sure that it will be given back to the community.

1.13: Chest placement & item frames

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From 1.13, Chests can be placed next to each other. This might offer much more compact storage room layouts. Chest will be combined only by shift-clicking them onto each other like hoppers on chests, but if placed normally on the ground, they can be placed next to each other in any manner. Also, item frames can be posted on the top and bottom of blocks.

Will you re-design your storage area? Where will you put item frames if you place them more compact? Show us your best storage area layout!

1.13: Bubble columns

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In 1.13, we will be able to breath under water by placing Lava blocks & Soul sand which create bubble columns in 2+ block deep water. While this is nonsense in real life (steam is not breathable), it seems like a cool option to have. I am not sure what I will do with it to breathe, but it could be a great addition to the floating items so that we can easily transport things in water downward. Soul sand will push items upwards, I am not sure how this compares to normal water that has items floating.

Since the “air meter” of you character will not recover instantly when you get to the surface, previous ways of working underwater will have to be changed anyhow, so using the lava and soul sand blocks will be useful.

 

1.13: Items floating!

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As you know by now, 1.13 is around the corner with some quite drastic changes to the way a lot of base game mechanics are working. Specifically, Items will float: This means that you can transport items vertically upwards in a water column. Interestingly, stuff dropped into 1-block high water with air below still falls through. It seems that a transport is best done with a dropper at the base of the water.

Anyone has a better way to insert items into a water column? Will you change your mob farms?

Today’s development updates

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This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes.
Our webserver is completely open source, hosted on GitHub. You can help improve the server by fixing issues here.

Today’s development updates

Posted on by

This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes.
Our webserver is completely open source, hosted on GitHub. You can help improve the server by fixing issues here.

Bug reporting / Bug bounty

Posted on by

I have just discovered that there are several things broken on the server and nobody told me about it. I doubt that nobody has realized those so far, so I have to assume that the people who saw the issue either assumed I know about them or made the decisions not to tell me for one or the other reason.

I would like to put a message out there regarding those bugs:

PLEASE TELL ME WHEN SOMETHING BREAKS!

Please do not think that I am busy and should not be bothered! I can manage my time myself. If you tell me about a bug, I will make my own decision when to fix it.

In order to encourage bug reporting, I want to introduce a bug bounty program. Essentially I will put all bugs that are known into the GitHub issues page and if someone reports something that is not in there yet, I will give an award. There might be several tiers, depending on the severeness of the bug.

Please tell me what you think can be good rewards for bug reporting that encourage people to report stuff but are not so generous that they break the in-game economy.

Lot regeneration decision

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So I just now ventured into a snapshot of the 1.13 version and generated a world with the same seed as our Empire. The world looks pretty much identical to ours. I think the main differences are only the ones which are already introduced before 1.13. There are however some upcoming changes that are planned in 1.13 which are not active in the snapshots yet, such as Magma blocks in underwater ravines and coral reefs in ocean biomes.

So since the 1.13 is generally quite similar but introduces some changes, I made the decision to wait with the regeneration of the empty empire lots until the 1.13 release so that we get those changes as well, specially because the rest of the world will most likely fit in 100%.

If the edges between occupied lots (which will stay the same) and empty lots (which I will then re-generate with 1.13 version) will be seamless, I will consider to do the same for the kingdom, possibly also Aether.

We can consider regenerating the darklands as well, specially to have the corals more accessible, but I am not 100% decided on that one yet. I will first do the general server upgrade, then the empty lot reset and then we can decide if it’s worth it to regenerate the darklands as well with some time to prepare for it to salvage existing structures such as rails etc.

Hope that is fine with everyone.