#minecraft

The family runs a modded Minecraft server, and picking a world seed for it used to mean actually generating the world and rendering a map to look at it, which took about nine minutes per seed. Nine minutes does not sound like much until you want to look at a dozen seeds and compare them, and at that point nobody did it, because who is going to sit through an hour and a half of world generation just to browse. So we picked whatever seed looked fine on the first try and lived with it.

I wanted to be able to type a seed and see the terrain right away, the same way the vanilla seed map sites let you do for unmodded worlds. Ours is modded though, so those sites are useless to us, they have no idea what our biome tables look like.

The family runs a modded Minecraft server off the home server, a big modpack on an older version of Forge, and for a while it just worked, until people started getting kicked with out of memory errors on their own computers, not the server, the client. Sometimes it was ten minutes in, sometimes an hour or two, but it always ended the same way, a wall of red text about not being able to reserve memory.

My first instinct was that it was just too many mods, which is the usual answer for almost any modded Minecraft problem, so we went down the suspect list one at a time.

The mod that renders far away terrain got blamed first, since it is the hungriest thing running by design, but a live memory reading during a crash showed it barely moved. A minimap mod with its own image cache came next, and directly measuring it came back to a few megabytes, nothing close to the scale of the problem.