InsaneJ

On our server we have tried a couple of different ways to get a second TFC world to run along side the original one. This became our HardCore world.The only way to do this, that we know of, is to use Cauldron and the Multiverse plugin. As far as we know no Forge mod can get two TFC worlds to run along side nicely.Keep in mind that TFC does not work well when it has more than 1 world running in a single Minecraft instance. You will encounter a few strange timing issues. Nothing too dramatic or game breaking. Some of the TFC mechanics finish instantly while others just act a bit strange. TFC wasn't build like most other Forge mods to work well with multiple worlds. This is why we changed to a 2 server setup. Each server runs 1 TFC world and both servers are connected via Bungeecord.

As for having two TFC worlds in your mod pack, I don't think this is possible for a single player version of the pack.

Installing and running Opis may also help you track down what's causing the issue. Clients do not have to install this in order to join the server. Just an OP who wants to use it.

Perhaps the server is running out of memory still? 2GB like Kitty recommended should be fine for just 3 players, but you could try increasing it to 4GB and see if that makes any difference. More than 4GB really shouldn't be necessary for 3 players. If it is then there is probably something else wrong.

A tick time of 20ms should not lag at all. Anything below 50ms per tick should be perfectly fine, especially on your hardware. Did you update your OS recently? If not do the following from a command prompt:

sudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get upgrade

I've got 380 hours into Civilization V according to Steam. I've made the mistake of buying Civ V without all it's DLC so I ended up buying it a second time with all the DLC included for less than the price of the original game. Still a bit of a waste though. So now I'm waiting for a bundle that includes Civilization: Beyond Earth and all of it's DLC.

Also hoping for a nice discount on Grim Fandango Remastered and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.

http://gaben.happydiggers.net/

So what are you looking forward to?

If you want to go all out and increase difficulty and believability then using beasts of burden seems to fit the TFC theme. And that means using a different approach to mining because you will probably want to take those animals down with you to carry all of your stuff.

The most important question though is: would it be fun to play this way? I think more experienced TFC players (than me) should answer this.

Donkeys for transport?

Just thinking out loud here. What if cobble/dirt blocks would no longer stack in your inventory? So each block would take up 1 space in your inventory. Along comes a donkey with storage that allows you to stack cobble/dirt making it a viable mode of transport for such goods.

Maybe a glitch in the Matrix? Download links seem to work for me at this time.

http://terrafirmacraft.com/download.html

That's true. On our server we seem to have hit the limit at around 15.000 tile entities. When you get this many tile entities loaded all at once strange things start to happen. In our case players would get disconnected. The server would then be able to unload a bunch of tile entities and continue without crashing. So while the server didn't technically crash, it does prevent players from continuing normally.

The amount of loaded chunks and chunks being loaded/un-loaded is rarely an issue nowadays, unless you use a regular Forge server. Bukkit/Spigot and Cauldron perform these actions multi-threaded which gives a huge performance boost. However the main game logic is still single-threaded. With a mod like TFC there is a lot of stuff going on all the time in the way of tile entity updates. On our server the biggest load is generated by tile entities followed by mobs.

Tile entity updates are required for things like:

• tiled soil
• growing plants (on tiled soil)
• fruit trees
• chests
• barrels
• TFC 'machines'
• etc.

Minecraft tries to update all of those things 20 times per second. Like Bunsan explained, if you have 10 people close together, let's say inside 1 town, and they share their resources then there isn't a whole lot the server has to update usually. Just the one town. However if those 10 players each have a town spread out across the map then the server has to update 10 farms, 10 sets of barrels, 10 sets of anvils, 10 sets of farm animals, etc. Suddenly the server load has increased significantly.

The thing about mobs is that you don't want to put them in a space where they bump into the walls or each other a lot. You can put 10 pigs in a 16x16 block pen and it'll be fine. Put those 10 pigs in a 2x2 pen and suddenly you're creating a huge load on the server. On our server we have occasionally had people mass breeding chickens inside of small pens. There would be dozens of chickens inside of a small space taking up a large chunk of the server's capacity. Keep in mind that one bad mob farm won't kill a server. But if you have half a dozen of such farms you will notice the effect on a populated server. This is why we limit the amount of tiled soil, fruit trees, anvils and adult farm animals players can have inside of each town. We'd prefer not to impose such limitations, but if we don't then the server would come to a grinding halt because it needs to update all that stuff and it's a lot of stuff to update

I've added a VIP server rank section to the opening post of this thread. It contains the following information:

VIP server rank

People in the V.I.P. group are considered trusted players of the HappyDiggers community. They gain access to our whitelisted Vanilla Minecraft server and our Feed The Beast server which runs develpment builds of the HappyDiggers AMP mod pack. V.I.P. members also have access to the /mute command which they can use to help staff members with players who use abusive language or are bullying other players. The rules for using the /mute command are outlined here. (Accessible only for V.I.P. members.)

Access to the V.I.P. group is by invite only. The only way to get invited to the V.I.P. group is by being an outstanding member of the HappyDiggers community. You will have to make a positive contribution on our server and the other V.I.P.s have to like playing with you. The other V.I.P. members may nominate and vote on new V.I.P. members once a month. We try to add at least one new member each month.

Things you can do to help improve your chances of being nominated:

• Be a nice person to play with on our servers.
• Have a spotless record in regards to the server rules.
• Help out other players any way you can.
• Start or join community projects and take them to the next level.
• Report abusive players to the staff. Staff members also vote.
• Be active on the server and the HappyDiggers forum.
• Be patient. Don't ask to be nominated, it hurts your chances. It can take a couple of months before you are nominated. People just have to get to know you and notice you.

Does your server have a name? Adding that to the topic title may make it more convenient for people to talk about and finding your server thread

Thanks for reporting. It's been taken care of. http://happydiggers.net/showthread.php?1384-Warned-players-and-banlist&p=12612&viewfull=1#post12612

From experience I know that the FTB guys do a really good job at enforcing mod permissions for all the mod packs on their launcher. If you don't have permission for a certain mod, your pack won't be on their launcher.

With Technic it's the wild west. Anyone can put any mod without permission in their pack and on their launcher. It even goes so far that people modify mods without their author's consent and redistribute the modified code. This is not only something nobody should want, it's also illegal.

Ask the hosting company how to install mods on their service. They should be happy to explain how this works which should give you an indication if they are the kind of hosting company you're looking for.

As for your question about RAM. Like Bunsan said it depends on how many players you want to be able to join. It depends heavily what the players are doing on the server. For example a single large farm with a lot of tiled soil and a lot of fruit trees can bring down a high end server due to the amount of tile entities being used. In my experience it's impossible for any TFC server to have more than 30 players on that have a decent progression in the game without the server starting to lag. Whereas with regular Minecraft 300 players isn't a problem.

HappyDiggers has two TFC instances running with 8GB each that can hold up to 20 players and it's generally lag free (server wise). When we let more players in the server becomes CPU bound around 25 players due to Minecraft being a single threaded application which can't take advantage of multiple CPU cores. And like I said earlier, at 30 players it starts to lag quite badly at times depending on what people are doing. If for example you allow players to teleport you can expect a small lag spike each time someone teleports. With 20 players on our Regular TFC server people teleport on average twice per minute to town spawns and "homes". The tile entities mentioned above come into play when there are too many tiled soil blocks and fruit trees loaded which can happen if people scatter instead of live together in a few large towns. The same goes for farm animals which is why we limit those things via the server rules.

Lastly what kind of server do you want to run? Regular Forge or Cauldron with Bukkit plugins? Cauldron as a server is vastly superior to regular Forge performance wise but that's only an issue with 10 players or more. Do you want to run additional mods/plugins or only TFC? Keep in mind that the TFC devs do not support platforms or mods that modify Minecraft base classes like Cauldron and Optifine. With the exception of Fastcraft it looks like, although I'm not sure why that is. (Is there perhaps a forum post somewhere explaining the official standpoint on Fastcraft?) Regardless if you're going to use Cauldron or mods that modify Minecraft base classes you may encounter problems that need some special attention with which you can't get help on these forums. So if you want to go the way of least resistance, go with regular Forge as a platform and no mods outside of TFC.

A rough estimate on RAM usage with players doing lots of TFC stuff (tiled soil, fruit trees, animals, multi-block structures, the works):

5 players - 2GB

10 players - 4GB

15 players - 6GB

20 players - 8GB

Again, RAM usage depends heavily on what players are doing in game and if you're running additional mods or plugins.

In my opinion TFC Factions is not a great idea. TFC requires quite a lot of time to get things up and running. A lot more so than regular Minecraft. With Factions you should expect all your stuff to be destroyed on a regular basis. I don't think this combines well with TFC. I would expect players to leave such a server quite quickly after they loose hours of work.

Fortunately people are free to setup any kind of TFC server they like and I encourage people to do so. After all the more TFC servers the better. I'm just saying that I wouldn't want to host such a server.

I've just updated the Hardcore section of the opening post of this thread. Please read the new information. (Tenandra, your application is fine. Just wait for Jiro to process it please.)

Even the biggest Internet Exchange in the world can go down. Which is what happened this afternoon. .

The end result was that a lot of sites, including HappyDiggers, went down for a short time. Here's a graph showing the resulting decrease in traffic flowing through the Amsterdam Internet Exchange:

Downtime is never fun. But at least this tme I didn't have to do anything to get things up and running again

Update from the AMS-IX:

DESCRIPTION:

Dear Tech-L subscribers,

Today Wednesday 13/05/2015 at 12:20 UTC+2 an installation engineer working on the PE under maintenance in EQUINIX AM3, while testing one of the newly installed 100GE modules, accidentally placed a loop on the ISP peering VLAN.


DETAILS:

The loop caused a high CPU on all backbone and customer modules resulting in many BGP sessions dropping.
The incident lasted 10 minutes.
BGP sessions are restoring.

HappyDiggers TFC uses the BungeeCord proxy to link 3 different servers together. We have a regular Minecraft 1.7.10 server running on Spigot and 2 TFC servers running on Cauldron. So far things are running great. But feel free to join our server and judge for yourself. Server thread can be found in the server section of this forum.

We're using BungeeCord server commands, BungeePortals and Holographic Displays to allow players to teleport between servers.

Both website URLs from the opening post are down but the server seems to be up on the foxtopia.me domain. However regular players can't play on that server since they can't open the pen doors at spawn. They are stuck there for the time being.

The server was down for maintenance. I had to move it to another case. There are a bunch of reasons for doing this. Mostly because the old one had served it's purpose for the better part of a decade and was getting hopelessly out of date. But mostly because I couldn't put in more drives in because the clips on the side of the drive bays had all broken off during the years. Instead of being able to put in 16 drives behind active cooling (and 6 with passive cooling), I could only sort of put in 8 and that's with some fancy McGuyvering. So I decided it was time to replace the old case with something shiny, a Fractal Design DEFINE R4 Black Pearl. The new case has room for 8 drives behind active cooling and up-to-date features like tool less access, dust filters, noise dampening material, more cooling fans, etc.

The maintenance should have lasted about an hour...

While moving the parts from the old to the new case it looked like the PSU had died. There appeared to be a short circuit. This is one tough PSU, it's been with me for well over a decade now. Thermaltake pure power 680W. I was more surprised that it had lasted this long running 24/7 than that it would have broken down at this point. So I replaced it with a Corsair AX850. And then of course the thing still didn't work. While troubleshooting further I found that one of the fans in the 5 1/4" drive enclosures was causing the short circuit. This is an enclosure that holds the 4 SSD drives on which the Minecraft servers run. Not a good place to have a short circuit in.

All in all I wasted 2 hours of my time trying to pin down the exact problem and a perfectly good PSU which will now probably collect dust for a decade. All because I suspected it was dead after a decade. Lesson to be learned here: never assume anything!

After the hardware issues were resolved I turned on the server and checked that the TFC and TFCHC servers were running. What I didn't check for were the Lobby and proxy server. Those didn't automatically start I discovered this morning. So after manually starting those, every thing was up and running again.

Right now the server holds the following drives:

• 2x 3TB 7200 rpm Seagate drives in RAID 1 for OS, mail and website.
• 2x 300GB 10.000 rpm WD Velociraptor drives in RAID 0 for Dynmap tiles.
• 4x 80GB Intel Postville SSD in RAID 5 for Minecraft servers.
• 3x 3TB 5400rpm WD Red drives in RAID 5 for bulk storage.

The drives are all connected to an Areca 1680i dual core 1.2GHz IOP348 PowerPC RAID controller with 4GB cache memory.

So yeah, just another day in the life of a server host

The Hardcore world has been moved, destroyed and re-created to, on and at a new server. So as of right now we have linked together the Regular and Hardcore HappyDiggers TFC servers behind a proxy. This means players join our server at: tfc.happydiggers.net:4000 and from there they can go to the Regular or Hardcore TFC servers. There is also a Lobby server which has a ton of mini games which acts as a fall back servers when one of the others fails or is taken down for maintenance.

The Hardcore map is 42.000 x 42.000 blocks in size and is fully pre-generated. This means it's smaller than the Regular world which is 80.000 x 80.000 blocks in size. Nevertheless it's still a huge map.

Right now we're still keeping the Hardcore server whitelisted so we don't open the floodgates of regular players there right away. The idea is that we don't want to get a ton of small towns on the Hardcore world. To help this further we require new players, on the Hardcore server only, to play 48 hours before they can create their own towns. In the mean time they are free to join other people's towns. To make sure nobody gets left behind in the wilderness we are starting a server town. Everybody will be welcome to join this town if they wish. The whitelist will be removed in about a week or so. From that point on players will be allowed to move freely between the Regular and Hardcore servers. Player inventories are not shared between servers.

There are 3 ways to travel between the servers.

1. Use the /server command. This gives you a list of servers which you can visit. For example: /server tfc

2. Use the portals. Just walk through them to initiate transport.

3. Use the hologram signs. Just click on the sign to initiate transport.

Towny's global chat channel [g] is transmitted between servers. You can easily recognize which server someone is chatting on from the server prefix. Town, nation, private and other chat channels are local to the server you are on and thus not transmitted to the other servers.

Each HappyDiggers TFC server has it's own Dynmap:

http://tfc.happydiggers.net/

http://tfchc.happydiggers.net/

To help players find their friends on the server we now have an integrated TAB screen that shows online players on all three servers.

That's it for now. Have fun on the new Hardcore map. And if you have any trouble please let us know

Thank you (and Kitty and whomever else may have looked at it ) for taking the time to investigate. Unfortunately the problem isn't in one location, it's happening all over the map at dozens of locations.

Players enjoy the dangers of cave ins. Turning that off would disappoint a lot of people. Because of this we have decided to generate a new map for our hardcore server using TFC 79.18.

Should we happen to encounter this problem again, would you be interested in follow up reports?

After fixing a handful of affected areas we've given up hope that this will solve the issue for us. The problem seems to happen all over the map at different locations.

Do you have any indication of how many falling blocks are too many? Because from what I can tell so far it's never more than a few dozen at a time. In the MCEdit example posted above it's 55 falling blocks for a single region file.

On vanilla Minecraft (running on Spigot) I've seen literally hundreds of thousands of falling sand blocks fall down without much more than a bit of lag for a few seconds while they updated. On our TFC server we've seen it process and log over a million block updates an hour due to snow without problems.

You're one of the TFC devs and if you say the problem is caused by too many block updates then who am I to argue with that? It's just that I'm not seeing it right now. When there are too many block updates happening on a server it will cause the server to lag, time out or even freeze but it doesn't crash. I've never seen a server crash because of the load being too high. Going out of memory, sure that will crash a server. Having a ton of entities spawned in will cause you to disconnect. Having several thousands of block updates per second will cause low TPS. But server crashes are most always a result of a bug of some kind.

Please reconsider the diagnosis of this problem.

The problem occurs when a single player joins the sever. That person doesn't even have to do anything, just join. Therefore it can't really be avoided by being careful when out exploring I'm afraid.

If the problem lies in too many block updates due to falling blocks. Wouldn't a possible solution be to limit the amount of simultaneously falling blocks? Perhaps something like: blocks needs to fall, check how many are already falling, any block that goes over the limit (config option?) gets put in a queue, check queue every 10 ticks or so?

If what you say is correct it should only affect the behavior of really large cave-ins. The smaller ones that aren't a problem should then happen as they do now.