GTNH 2021 Testing Results!

So we had a Pre Launch / Test Server running for GTNH for almost 1 week. This was considered a soft launch server if things went fine and a total Alt + F4 if things failed miserably and sadly that they did…

The good news is we were prepared for worst case scenario by warning everyone ahead of this that this might happen. Not only that, but GTNH 2.1.1.0 is being delayed a bit due Real Life Issues outside of the GTNH universe. Because of this it feels like we are not being hit as hard and we felt the issues for sure during our 1 week of testing.

The First 3 Crashes:

The first biggest issue that came up was a really rare bug that apparently only we have reported it twice in the history of GTNH that caused our server to crash none stop when a user loaded up a certain chunk in the world.

java.lang.ClassCastException: gregtech.common.blocks.GT_TileEntity_Ores cannot be cast to net.minecraft.tileentity.TileEntityChest

So what happen here is during World Generation at some point a GT ore and a Vanilla Chest from a Spawner Room decided to have a fight and unfortunately visually the chest won but functionally neither won at all. In Crucible / Thermos the server seems to crash when the chunk loads and with Forge itself it seems to only causes kick from the server via Interaction with a possible crash if you interact with it in other ways like a hopper.

We learned that this bug exists in Vanilla with a VERY VERY rare chance of say a spawner and a chest colliding and causing strange interactions like Pig Spawner forming due to damaged NBT Data. In Our case GregTech Ore’s are actual title entities. You can have Million+ GT Ore’s in a single Region all acting like Tile Entities and all it takes is a rare chance of a chest / spawner fighting over the same spot..

We also think Chunk-Pregenerator might of has somethings to do with it as well. I don’t understand the ins and outs of generation layering, etc. But due to the Brute force nature of using Chunk-Pregenerator it might of had a play in this as well.

Say No To Cotton:

Our next issue took us most of the week to sort of figure out the issue that was causing our server to lag the players out and even stall the entire instance. The Closest thing we figured it out and were able to repeat was one the players Cotton Farms and picking said Cotton.

The Farms Specs were quite simple. It was a 9×9 Cotton farm with Water in the Center of the farm using Natura Cotton. When the user picked their Cotton Farm the server in many times would stall out without giving us any kind of details. We ended up running a bunch of profilers, debuggers, etc. Just to come up with pretty much the same answer.

at cofh.asmhooks.HooksCore.getEntityCollisionBoxes(HooksCore.java:106)

Entity Collision Box Issues… Most people outside our server said someone is spamming too many items, etc and acting like it was a normal day in the Minecraft Server world… Me sitting here thinking WTH! I been running Minecraft server for now over a decade and I know the difference in someone blowing up massive chest array of items and destroying the TPS vs a full out stall. Not only that our entity counts never actually went that high.

You can see with the above timings graph with the Orange Spike being our TPS that we only had 2997 Entities world wide at the time. Even then that list did not correspond to the 5 players online at the time who had under 100 entities at most showing up. So I 100% no it was not due to, too many items on the ground in the world to cause said stall. Not only that it was always a instant hitting stall and not a build up to the stall it just hit hard and many times would never recover from the stall. If it did recover it would drop back down instantly and not slowly recover.

I still can’t tell you exactly what causes it or even how to fix it. My guess is the Cotton farm interaction and something in the area help produce a flaw with the world gen and the right conditions to make the world go nuts.. I personally had issues on my land where I could not place a sapling down on Dirt if there was missing block under that dirt block. Not saying it’s related in anyway to this other issue, but there was some strange things going on. I don’t know if will even fully understand the issue.

The Inside Out World

Our Last and maybe biggest issue when it comes to the visual pleasing world and places to Mine is our World Generation.

We tend to always use Chunk-Pregenerator by Speiger and he does an amazing and fine job with it. That being said even though he is constantly working on it even rewriting big portions of the code, it never seems to play correctly with 1.7.10 Minecraft.

The above image is a perfect example of what is happening from time to time. Now we spoke before that World Generation happens in different layers. Like I said I don’t know the ins and out on how it works and what order but just imagine the base world is created without caves and ore. Then another layering happens to add say caves and then one to add the final details like ores and trees.

So from the above image we are finding that those regions / chunks are damaged beyond repair and usage. Where we thought is was surface cosmetic damage also ended up breaking the GT Ores under them as well preventing the land from being useful…

We also fear this might of created other issues and possible even affected our Crash & Stalling issues that had plagued our server. We might not full know all the answers and almost everyone told us it was this issue or another, but we could never find an actual solution. One of the Crucible devs suggested our world is just bad and we should regenerate it. That being said honestly I think with Chunk-Pregenerator the problem will just happen all over again…

So what is the Solution and Conclusion?

We start fresh and wipe the server. This time we don’t use Chunk-Pregeneration nor do we use any other tool that progenerates the player outside of the player entity. We believe this alone will prevent any major issues and bugs from happening with the world Generation or at least resolve the massive cosmetic scarring of the worlds surface and ore generation issues under the scars.

We did our best debugging and testing and repeating these issues. Sadly we don’t have all the answers and a lot of developers we spoke too are kind of puzzled at it as well. It seems we like to attract the more rare issues when it comes to Minecraft bugs and we don’t mind that normally as long as we can find a solution to our problems.

So our Solution is this handy program that DvDmanDT had modified for his own personal use and is also one the GTNH Developers. The Program is called PregenTool and has quite a few nice options and uses rcon to teleport an actual player around the world.

The above image is an example of PregenTool live in action as I’m writing this blog post out. What it does is by default start the character at 0,0 and starts teleporting them every second 80 blocks away in a circular pattern. If the TPS increases past 50ms it will then pause the teleporting for 10 seconds and check the tps again and try again. If there has not been a response from the server after a while maybe a Minute? it will go ahead and stop the server and resume again after.

The tool is not perfect. For example if the player stalls out it keeps running even though there is no player existing. There are mods to auto log the character back into the server, but I have had nothing but bugs and issues with those as well. The one makes you click the auto relogin button physically and another one actually just breaks and goes to a relog loop even if you set to 120 seconds and are in the server it will actually relog again into the server and disconnect you haha.

The best settings we are finding so far and are constantly adjusting them is 2 second teleport jumping vs the default 1 second. This helps it catch up a bit faster then normally but is never perfect and can still stall out. Thankfully the tool also has a Start / Start Rect option so you can just restart the entire tool and set it back to your last location that you had mapped with jmap on the client side. The picture above actually shows these settings.

Another way that Might work better and I will try it if I still have issues and maybe before bed is to use a shorter jump distance say 40 blocks or even 20 blocks, but increase the speed of the jumps themselves.

In the end so far we generated out to 4,000 x 4,000 and the terrain is perfect without any visual errors at least via the map. The best part is even the Witchery Walls are showing up now that you normally see in single player or servers that don’t pregen their worlds.

I hope you enjoyed reading my broken English and enjoyed the little history of our server. We hope to have our new server up and running by the weekend though it might be delayed at were about 1/4 of the way there in the generation and we still will need to build spawn / bunkers and do a few other checks and changes. That being said will be ready when we are ready and will do the best to our abilities.

Thank you to the 13 players who checked our server out during this week of now what we call testing!

FTB: Interactions Shutdown

The time has come to put FTB: Interactions to sleep. Sadly the server died on it’s own due to no players. It’s been almost 2 weeks since a single sole has logged onto our servers. As always we don’t shutdown our servers for fun when we feel like it but when there is no one left to play it.

Thanks for everyone coming out and playing and will see you at our next server launch!

GTNH 2020 Shutdown

We have decided to Shutdown GTNH 2020 Server. Sadly it was a rough year for GTNH Community itself it went through a lot of changes. We also made some mistakes with this server changing too many things and using a strange dev build that never saw the light of day for a very long time. Because of this we never got on the Server List as well as everyone had to use a Custom client to play on our servers to fix a few issues and bugs.

Do to this mistake we sadly lost our playerbase overtime and we promise to make a better server with less modifications and using only release builds of GTNH in the future.

Hopefully will be Back Late Spring Early Summer of this year and make our best GTNH Server Yet! Stay Tuned!

We thank everyone who did join us it was a lot of fun. Here is the top players who had no life 🙂

FTB Interactions Server!

Hey everyone, our Feed The Beast Interactions Minecraft Server for 2020/2021 is Now Online!

Main Server Info:
Current Version: 2.0.10
ModPack Download: Link
Supported Launcher: MultiMC
Server Address: mc.stonelegion.com:2222

Other Server Info:
World Border: 16,500 x 16,500
Whitelist: None
Discord: wxDbeChemx

Please note we are using the latest version of FTB Interactions found from the FTB Discord in the FTB Interactions channeled Pinned. Right now the Latest Version FTB / Overwolf seems to offer is only 2.0.9.

Just Download and Run MultiMC. Make sure you setup the correct Java Paths. Once you do this all you have to do is Drag and Drop the FTB Interactions ModPack Zip File onto MultiMC Window and it will start to download / install automatically.

Pretty much the Only Changes made was to rebalance dungeon loot. Outside that the Pack is as Vanilla as it gets.

Please make sure you check out our Discord if you need any further help or like to just chat with us!

GTNH 2020 Dedicated Server Is Happening!

We have some wonderful news to share with you today. We are planning on running a GTNH 2020 Dedicated Server Next Year (GregTech New Horizons).

What is crazy about GTNH is that it’s still running 1.7.10 Minecraft but has more updates then most of the biggest packs on the market and continues to evolve and grow as time goes on.

The reason we decided to run our third GTNH Server is simply it is one the best packs out there. Enough content that most people can’t ever make it to endgame and challenges where it feels great to accomplish something even as small as bulding a farm.

Last post we talked about building a new server and it’s still planned. Were now more focused on the Ryzen 9 3900X with 12 cores for the ultimate performance for this and many of our future servers.

We hope to have our new servers built in the early 2020 and Launch GTNH once 2.0.8.0 is out and our new server is built!

Our Current Planned Specs:

  • AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 3.8 GHz 12-Core Processor
  • Asus Prime X470-Pro ATX AM4 Motherboard
  • G.Skill Aegis 64 GB (4 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory
  • XPG GAMMIX 2TB S11 Pro 3D NAND PCIe NVMe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 R/W up to 3500/3000MB SSD
  • Corsair VS 650 W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply
  • Rosewill RSV-R4100-4U Rackmount Server Case/Chassis – 8 Internal Bays

We plan on doing a few changes like nerfing Rogue Dungeons and Loot Games and a few other tweaks. Nothing game breaking more just smoothing it out so people not rushing to pillage everything to have a upper hand.

Please check out our discord from the top of our site to stay informed with our latest developments!

Future Servers & New Hardware for the Future.

It’s finally time to consider new Hardware for our future servers. It’s been harder and harder to run our servers using so many weaker hardware and the power consumption is through the roof as well.

Right now our Server potential is 8 x 2600K’s if they were fully up and running and operational. If they were hitting there max TDP (Thermal design power) they would be 760 Watts (95 Watts Each) In Theory for their maximum power consumption. We normally don’t look at TDP and calculate our Hydro costs but rather use it to help compare the usage to other cpu’s on the market.

More Modern CPU’s are also using between 60-95 TDP, but their modern and providing more cores and more single thread performance. Now keep in mind this does not also include other things like PSU overhead / loss, Ram, Hard Drives, etc eating even more power up.

If we Use PassMark to Bench our CPU’s we have a CPU Mark Score of 8434 and a Single Thread Score of 1,941 and that is still considered decent in 2019 for most servers. That being said there is a lot of games becoming very creative that ends up pushing the bounds of that single core performance that makes it more difficult.

Now if we take that main score and x 8 we get 67,472 score and now you have a decent small cluster of CPU Power but not amazing for 8 Servers that are now eating 760+ Watts of power.

Now let’s compare it to a more Modern CPU and we are going to actually compare it to AMD as AMD in 2019 has really come in fierce by providing some the best CPU’s for the best value and keeping their TDP down quite a bit.

The AMD Ryzen 7 3700X is one of Ryzen new Flagship CPU’s that runs a TDP of 65W but not only that it runs a single thread performance of 2,908 and a overall score of 23,862 with it’s 8 cores. That is quite impressive for both those very heavy server applications on a Single Thread and those other applications that let you run on multiple threads. The best part you can put multiple game servers on this and still have room to breath.

So if you were to buy 3 AMD Ryzen 7 3700X you would end up at a score of 71,586 vs the 67,472 and your max TDP would also become 195 Watts compared to a whopping 760 Watts and this day of age where power is insanely expensive that is a very very good thing.

Not only would our Power Usage and costs go down but we can actually add proper updates that would increase our speeds overall in so many areas like Ram & Hard Drives. Right now were using basic SSD’s but we can finally move to NVMe where we can get 6-10 times the Read / Write Speeds compared to our past SSD’s and our Memory from DDR3 to DDR4 and not only that prices would go down as DDR3 is quite expensive where DDR4 is quite cheap now on the market and continuing to drop.

With this setup as well we be able to fit in 4x16GB of Ram so each box could be running 64 Gigs of Ram and that is quite awesome for our ram needs and usage. Compared to our current Mix of 8-24 Gigs we have now due to costs and lack of decent supply of DDR3 on the market.

So calculating the Cost for fun I put in a 1TB NVMe, 64 Gigs ram, 550W PSU, 4U Rackmount Server Case with 8 Internal Bays, The 3700 with a Decent Cooler, MSI Gaming Motherboard we come to a total of $1324.26 Canadian or $995.57 USD and that is with Tax. Not bad for a Modern Day Beast of a Server. Clearly this me throwing all quickly on Amazon to get an idea what we are dealing with.

This investment will not be something I make right away. It will be something I start doing sometime Next Year it could be in the Spring or even the Summer time, but it’s something I’m highly considering doing and honestly I doubt I will not do it as long as I can keep growing with my other projects.

I thought it be fun to document this and be a little more open about the costs of building a server and even the Power consumption of a server. Keep in mind I was sharing max value’s and the servers don’t just sit there eating away a 100 Watts an hour idle.