It’s been a while since my last update! TLDR: We’ve upgraded the server to 1.18.2. Also, I’ve made some changes that I hope will solve some of the poor performance I was seeing. I also completed the bridge between E-Tower at home base, and the glass pyramid. And the Map room has been completely reworked, and a new cafe was added above the map room where the old sorter was.

Starting with the performance fix, as I troubleshot the issue, I found that the server was tracking over 2000 active entities, which is a huge number for a server this size with only a couple active players at any point. After some detective work, I was able to determine that the culprit was our world map! It seems that Minecraft tracks item frames as entities just as if they were a monster. So in that room, we basically have a ~50×50 map which is 2500 entities. Normally, that would be no problem as the chunks containing all those would only be loaded when a player was nearby. But, since the supply rail line went through there, I’d marked those chunks to always stay loaded. Not good! For those not aware, the supply rail line runs continuously to empty chests from homebase and other farms back to the storage cave. To remedy this and keep the rail line running, I rerouted the supply rail line around those chunks, moved the loader for both the slime farm and the E-tower, and unmarked all the chunks for the map room. Now, we are seeing much more respectable 20-30 live entities being tracked. I’m seeing much less server lag now.

However, now that got me looking at the map room and I realized it had developed in a haphazard way and was a little all over the place. I decided to clean it up! I leveled out the roof, made the roof iron (since we have a ton), removed some of the glass ceiling, expanded the side of the room with the glass so it is square which now includes part of the “device” so it is easier to see, added a standard glass walkway above the map, and streamlined the express line path a bit. In the process, I closed off a bit of what was above the map area, where the old sorter and safety room were, and turned it into a cafe.

I completed a bridge between homebase e-Tower and the glass pyramid. I was going for a flowing, elvish kind of look with curves, a lot of glass, and lit by lanterns. Of course, it’s made of iron too!