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Sunday 24 November 2013

World Issues & The Future

As some of you already know we've had a few random restarts over the last week or so, I can confirm that with one exception these were chunk problems being detected and fixed.

I have been monitoring this and the crashes, although still a significant time apart, are becoming more frequent, I have tried every available tool to try and correct the root cause of the the problem with no success. Although to be honest any fix would be unlikely to be a long term solution, most chunk repair tools I tried would require removing 20% or more of the worlds chunks, leaving it in quite a mess with a large number sudden terrain / biome changes in a straight line, many peoples regions reset or possibly cut in half etc, and with no guarantee that the issues wouldn't return a month or so later.

As I'm sure most of you know most Tekkit Classic servers with similar player numbers to us reset the world every 2-3 months or have regular rollbacks for this very reason, so we are actually quite lucky that our map has lasted 7-8 months without a single rollback of more than a few minutes required, especially when you consider that on an average day we have 300+ players log in and have an average of over 400,000 block changes.

Again some of you already know that I've been working hard behind the scenes to try and keep the server running without my major involvement next year due to other commitments and this has included the building of a new spawn, the intention now is to keep the new spawn where it is and make that a new world to replace the current one. 
However there is still significant work to be done before we can switch and I am unsure whether we can support 2 full size worlds at the same time so whilst I hope to be able to transfer builds across at least for VIP's, Staff & hopefully Member+ players I really cannot say at this point what will and won't be possible. For now though please make use of VIP Island and The Vault to backup your items just in case things get significantly worse and we suddenly have to switch worlds with little or no notice.

I'm also concerned that the process of switching etc may be so time consuming that it may hinder my chances of getting the server ready for January, as always I'll try my best but cannot make any promises at the moment as this is incredibly bad timing and it makes testing some of the required changes very difficult due to random errors and the possibility of more serious crashes relating to the main world having the potential to cause problems with mods/plugins and other worlds (I had to replace a couple of mods and a plugin with fresh copies after a crash yesterday).

So please encourage your friends etc to make use of The Vault and keep your fingers crossed that I can work things out for the long term, I will post updates here as soon as I know more.