Chunky Friends

Have you ever been cooking back at your base, and then you go to open your chest and… open your chest… open your… “why does it keep closing?! Oh, Steve is traveling to Narnia again.”

Meet, Chunky Friends! An automated chunk pregeneration scheduling tool. Save time, storage, and performance by having chunks generated automatically when you’re offline.

Highlights

• Suports Singleplayer & Multiplayer
• Client Optional
• Round Robin Player Selection
• Iterative Concentric Rings
• “Qualified Player” Eviction based on Last Login
• Runs automatically when you’re offline (“Pause” & “Resume”)
• Configuration via JSON, CLI, or GUI (when installed client-side)

How it works

The mod caches each player’s last known location when they log off, and when the last player has logged off of the server, it begins scheduling a variety of Chunky pregeneration tasks. The moment a player joins the server, Chunky tasks get paused, and the moment everybody logs off again, it resumes. When a player hasn’t logged on in X hours, they’re removed from the pregeneration pool, and once they login again, they’re re-added. You can also configure the mod to run even when players are connected to the server (if desired).

To keep things fair, it operates in round robin; each Chunky task starts small, and gets bigger over time. You choose the maximum generated zone, and how many slices of smaller concentric rings that gets broken down into.

Example Scenario

You have Steve, Alex, and Herobrine. The Tier 1 ring is 33 chunks, Tier 2 is 66 chunks, and Tier 3 is 100 chunks. You’d configure Chunky Friends as follows…

/chunkyfriends config maxradius 100
/chunkyfriends config ringcount 3
/chunkyfriends config curve linear

or for easier configuration (GUI is also available via Mod Menu)

/chunkyfriends gui

And once they all log off, they would receive their updates in this order.

• Pregen for Steve’s location, 33 chunks radius
• Pregen for Alex’s location, 33 chunks radius
• Pregen for Herobrine’s location, 33 chunks radius
• Pregen for Steve’s location, 66 chunks radius
• Pregen for Alex’s location, 66 chunks radius
• Pregen for Herobrine’s location, 66 chunks radius
• Pregen for Steve’s location, 100 chunks radius
• Pregen for Alex’s location, 100 chunks radius
• Pregen for Herobrine’s location, 100 chunks radius

Think of each player like a raindrop into a pond, and the concentric rings like the ripples that go outwards, eventually meeting other ripples, and cancelling out. The further away a raindrop is from the other raindrops, the more it’s ripple will travel before flattening out into the pond.

Since Chunky already handles deduplication (“this chunk was already generated; skipping”), implicit priority for pregeneration gets given to the people that have traveled the most, smoothing out the gameplay for everyone online when Steve decides to hop in a boat and hold ‘W’ for 3 hours.