AD Block Keeps Ticking

AD Block Keeps Ticking

Minecraft only simulates the world immediately around you. Step away from a farm and it freezes mid-growth: crops stop, furnaces stop, lambs stay lambs. Come back an hour later and nothing has moved.

This mod reconstructs what that time should have produced.

What it does

When a chunk stops being simulated, it is stamped with the time. When you return, the elapsed span is worked out and applied at once — crops advance, furnaces burn through their fuel, sugar cane stacks up, saplings become trees, animals grow up.

Crucially, none of this is done by replaying ticks. Each block’s end state is solved directly from the elapsed time, so a week of absence costs no more than a minute of it. The work is also spread across up to 20 server ticks, so walking back into your base never causes a freeze.

What gets simulated

• Crops — wheat, carrots, potatoes, beetroot and modded crops. Uses vanilla’s own growth-speed formula, so farmland moisture, soil type and crowding all still matter.
• Stems — pumpkin and melon.
• Other plants — nether wart, cocoa, sweet berries, sugar cane, cactus.
• Saplings — both growth stages and the tree itself, 2×2 species included.
• Farmland — drying out, rehydrating near water or in rain, reverting to dirt when bare. Never reverts while a crop is on it.
• Furnaces — furnace, blast furnace, smoker and modded variants. Smelting XP is preserved.
• Brewing stands — finishes a brew that was already running.
• Animals — babies maturing, breeding cooldowns expiring.
• Seasonal snow and ice — optional, needs Serene Seasons. See below.

What it deliberately does not do

Everything above, except the optional snow, is an independent progress system: its state depends only on itself and elapsed time. That is what makes an exact answer possible. Systems that are coupled — where one block feeds another and ordering matters — have no such answer, and are left alone rather than approximated badly.

• Redstone. An event-driven state machine. Knowing the state after a week means running several million transitions, and it mutates the world arbitrarily through pistons and dispensers. Vanilla already saves pending scheduled ticks, so a repeater caught mid-delay resumes correctly by itself.
• Crafters. Not time-driven at all — a crafter fires once per redstone pulse, so its rate is set entirely by a clock that cannot be simulated. A crafter in an unloaded chunk correctly makes nothing.
• Hoppers and item transfer. Real setups chain, branch and cross chunk borders, and neighbouring chunks keep independent timestamps, so moving items between them would either double-count or invent them.
• Mob spawning. Nothing was missed. Spawning requires a player within 128 blocks and hostile mobs despawn past that, so anything “spawned” while you were away would never have survived to greet you. Generating it would be inventing a mechanic, not restoring one.
• Campfires. Vanilla drops the cooked item on the ground, and dropped items despawn after five minutes. Simulating one would hand you food that could not still be there.

Because harvesting is not simulated, an automated farm returns one harvest’s worth rather than many. Sugar cane caps at three tall no matter how long you were gone. The error runs in the conservative direction by design.

Sleeping

Vanilla grants no growth for sleeping — it moves the clock, not the tick counter. This mod optionally credits that skipped time instead, and does it consistently: the skip is banked per dimension, so sleeping is worth the same whether or not you were standing next to the farm. Turn it off with simulateAfterSleeping to match vanilla exactly.

Serene Seasons

Fully supported. Serene Seasons gates growth by cancelling random ticks, which this mod never calls, so its rules are reproduced explicitly: crop seasons, greenhouse glass, tropical and permanently snowy biomes, infertile and blacklisted biomes, and all three out-of-season behaviours — grow slowly, no growth, and destroy.

The settings are read from Serene Seasons’ own config files, so the two can never disagree. Crop seasons come from its datapack tags, so there is no hard dependency: without Serene Seasons installed everything is simply treated as fertile, and the snow option does nothing.

Seasonal snow and ice (optional)

Turn on simulateSnow and chunks match the current season the moment they become active, and again when the season changes while you are standing in them.

• Winter: exposed surfaces get one snow layer. Water freezes from its edges inward, using vanilla’s own freeze rules, so a torch or lava next to a pond keeps it liquid and a river is not frozen solid in one go. Early winter is partial, mid and late winter fuller.
• Other seasons: surface snow and plain ice melt. Biomes that stay cold all year keep theirs, and tropical and blacklisted biomes are skipped.

This is a cosmetic approximation, not a reconstruction: weather is not tracked while a chunk is unloaded, so the result depends only on the season. It also only reaches chunks inside simulation distance, so very distant terrain keeps the look it was generated with until you get close.

Other mods

Growth is routed through NeoForge’s CropGrowEvent, the same hook vanilla growth uses. Any mod that gates farming through the standard event applies to catch-up too, without needing to know this mod exists.

Configuration

config/adblockkeepsticking-common.toml

• timeMode (default WORLD_TIME) — WORLD_TIME counts only time while the world is running. REAL_TIME also counts time spent offline.
• minInhabitedTicks (default 6000) — chunks lived in for less than this are never simulated, which keeps exploring new terrain cheap.
• lazyTaxPercent (default 0) — discards this share of elapsed time, if full catch-up feels too generous.
• maxCatchUpTicks (default 0) — ceiling on a single catch-up, mainly useful with REAL_TIME. 0 disables it.
• simulateAfterSleeping (default true) — credit skipped world-clock time to every chunk.
• simulateSnow (default false) — seasonal snow and ice. Needs Serene Seasons.
• disabledSimulations (default empty) — switch individual simulations off by name.
• debugLogging (default false) — log each chunk activation and what it changed. Noisy at large simulation distances; leave off for normal play.

Installation

Server-side only. On a dedicated server, install it on the server alone — clients do not need it and can connect without it. The mod registers no blocks, items or network packets, and nothing it stores is sent to clients.

Installing it client-side is harmless, and in single-player it is required as normal. The only client-facing feature is the config screen in the Mods menu.