Hylterium update — Skyblock performance, September 19

Hello everyone,

Today, we tackled Skyblock lag.

Several fixes were deployed throughout the day, and the latest restart brought the biggest improvement. Islands are now running at full speed, with much more performance headroom.

What you should notice

• Island worlds are now running at a stable 30 TPS, with processing times around three times shorter than before.
• Micro-freezes during harvesting, building, and events should be greatly reduced.
• The server should now handle events and high player activity much better.

Lighter island saving

The server was copying every modified zone twice per second. On islands with large automated farms, this kept the server busy constantly.

• Modified zones are now saved differently in order to reduce overload.
• Disconnects, world changes, and server restarts still save everything, just like before.

Sprinklers

Sprinklers were rewriting the soil in their area every time they passed, which kept the server working continuously.

Now, soil that is already watered is left alone. There is no change for you: your crops never dry out between passes, and the water particles remain visible.

Spawner ghost entities

We fixed invisible residues left behind by spawner previews, which were accumulating on islands.

• 6,958 residues were removed from affected islands.
• Automatic cleanup has been re-enabled to prevent this from happening again.

Balancing — Compost

Eternal onion farms were growing so fast that they were, by themselves, the main cause of island lag.

• The Compost multiplier has been slightly nerfed to help improve server performance.
• This change applies to all soils, including those that were already composted before today.

We know this directly affects large farmers, and this was not a decision we made lightly. It was the necessary compromise to help everyone get a smoother server experience again.

Your feedback on this balancing change is welcome, and we may adjust it if needed.

Technical side

We deployed our own diagnostic tool across all servers.

This tool allowed us to precisely identify the source of the lag, island by island, instead of guessing. It will stay in place to help us detect this kind of issue earlier in the future.

Thank you for your reports and your patience during the slowdowns of the past few days / weeks.

Have fun, and see you soon at the castle or on the islands!