I just wanted to voice a concern I have had for a long time and the main factor that has been driving me from playing MyM in the past few weeks. My modded Minecraft experience started and has mostly stayed with MyM for the entire year I have been playing but recently I tried out some other packs on other servers. The communities weren't as big and the servers not as organized but there is one thing that I really enjoyed and that was not having to build a 3x3 chunk base. I feel like it really limits a player's creativity and anyone with a functional base just builds a tower and aesthetics are out the window because you can't spread out. Huge builds like castles and villages are just not doable and leads to building the same 3x3 base on every server. Anyway, my suggestion would be to find a way to raise the chunk loading limit but maintain server performance. I believe increasing the chunk loading limit, at least by a bit, would improve performance because the server doesn't have to try and tick everything in one chunk at the same time. Also more chunks wouldn't really even mean more machines. Having more room doesn't mean more production machines and whatnot because the amount of machines I wanted would all have fit into the 3x3 chunks that everyone is limited to as of right now. What are your thoughts?
Could you please define chunk loading limit? Do you mean the chunk loaders (e.g. chicken chunks). Do you mean the chunks a player loads? while it might not sound like it, this is the best performing way. Because chunk loads are heavy. If everything is in one chunk the machines in this chunk are not loading the ones around it. (e.g. conduit moving items from one chunk to another would load the other chunk if it isn't loaded and keep doing this every tick depending on the setup)
I mean the overall chunk loaders a player can place. Having only 9 chunk loaders puts serious constraints on the creativity that a functional base can have. As for the machines, it would be instead of having 10 machines in 1 chunk, put 5 machines each in 2 chunks. So spreading out the machines so that there isn't one chunk that has tons of things to process per tick.
hmm, last time I was playing which was on infinity when it came out, I was just fine with only 3 spot loaders and a base spread across 12 chunks or more. We had 60k rf/t big reactors, ender quarry on max speed, one of the solar panels at the time where they were super expensive (ingots not nuggets).. 10 machines of each and 3 smelteries for ore processing.. I really don't see why it would be needed. To be honest, it wouldn't even had been a big down sight to not use chunk loaders at all. I'm not sure how others play. I can only say that with the proper setup chunkloaders are not needed at all. All I used them for was the me-import from the quarry, turtle ore farming at the beginning and farms away from the base/in another world. I do not believe in the idea of chunkloaders being necessary to load an entire base. More to help out with outsourcing. (quarry, turtle, mob farm..)
I'm not saying that more chunkloaders are necessarily needed but it'd be nice to be able to build a base outside of 3x3 chunks. Anything outside of the chunk the player is standing in doesn't load anything which means if I want to request something say with my ME system and the chunk with the machines isn't chunk loaded, then it basically will never finish until you go load the chunk. Everything is certainly doable in 3x3 chunks but it puts a huge constraint on how creative you can be with your build. Also as far as I'm aware, the chunk loaders don't even work when offline, so they only exist to fully load the base when the player is online.
Actually the chunks outside the chunk the player is in do load, just have a really low tick rate. There is also nothing anywhere saying your restricted to build only in 3x3 chunks, you can build as big as you like. you only have enough chunk loaders to load a 3x3 chunk, which actually is enough considering you dont need the entirety of your base loaded
The intent of allowing chunk loaders was to help out with outsourcing. Reasons at the time where buildcraft quarry overflow, wither farm in the end/nether, ender farm... It was never meant as base loading solution. Requesting items with the me system should work just fine. The system makes sure to load the chunks and the items will get through, same with conduits.
I know they do load but they load so slowly that it essentially doesn't matter. And building outside of the loaded chunks is not the problem. It's that you can't have a functional builds there that are useful like spreading out my machines. Anyway I see this isn't going anywhere so I might as well stop here :/
We have a new chunk loading system in development. When it gets out, loading a base will be more expensive while loading stuff early game and small bases will be cheap. The cost being calculated by the "value" of the chunk.
If this is so a big issue we can try to find a solution or work around. I haven't made the experience of it being an issue, when playing and not seen any reports/complaints despite at the beginning when you need to stand in the chunk of semltery for it to work..
I mean it might be better depending on how the new chunk loading system works, since the value of all the chunks combined would remain the same. I'm just trying to spread out my bases without having to give up the functionality that they have. I want to be able to build a village with a house for each mod or something like that where not everything has to be cramped into a small area so that it works. It's the same amount of machines and computing power necessary but its just spread out over lots of chunks
A simple solution would be to keep everything that needs constant loading in those 3x3 chunks. Mods like Thaumcraft, for instance, don't really need to be loaded when you arent using them. Put those mods further away, in your town.
I know that it is very possible to do a full run of machines in more than a 3x3 area. Even thaumcraft loaded from a node and was fully operable at all times. It may not be the way to do it but I had to do it that way because that was the only live node on the island.
tl;dr - You're asking for us to do things that are, at the current time, mutually exclusive due to minecraft coding, and physics. However the new chunkloading system should give us the ability to do this. In a perfect, white-listed server, with experienced, competent builders who are FULLY aware of the impact their tile entities pose on the server hardware, and a good amount of self-restraint, this wouldn't be an issue. However, with the current system, and the players being generally unaware of the impact their builds have on the server, this is not even going to be possible. We have younger players who have no idea what exactly a tile entity is. They just know that more = better = faster and this is a server and having 50000 machines is what the server was made for, right? More chunks constantly loaded = More tile entities/entities loaded = More load on the server. Its the way things work. The more chunks loaded, the more server performance is degraded. It's just the way minecraft is coded, as a (largely) single threaded piece of software. Vanilla servers can host hundreds of players with ease - because vanilla minecraft really doesn't have much in the way of active tile entities. Modded minecraft, on the other hand, is largely active tile entities (TE Machines. Ender IO machines, big reactors, conduits, ovens, tanks, etc, and so on). All of these entities are asking for a slice of processing time on the processor - and there is only so much time available! Once all the "idle" time in the processing loop is used up, then you start losing TPS. Once we get the new chunkloading system in place, and can start saying "It'll be prohibitively expensive to chunkload this chunk with 40 thousand active tile entities", however, I think you'll start seeing server performance naturally improve.
I think that the new chunk loading system would be a step in the right direction for what I'm asking for. I'd still have the same amount of machines, just spread out over more chunks, so my impact on the server will be more or less the same(same number of tile entities). In that case I'll just wait for the new chunk loading system and see what I can do then. Thanks again!
You dont need to load a 3x3 area. You can use spot loaders and load 9 single chunks through out your build. It leaves room for a lot of creativity if you use it wisely.
