Black Raven Dragoons

[Zancarius]

I've taken my Minecraft server offline. After doing a hardware swap, I've found that I hadn't planned for someone to be on it for nearly the entirety of the work day/work week, so it was interfering with things that I needed to do to the machine on an emergency basis. Because of extra maintenance required that hasn't been completed, I feel it's better to take it offline than it is to work around active players. One, it means I don't have to remember to restart Minecraft every time I reboot the machine; two, I don't have to schedule taking the system down to give players enough time so they may finish up what they're doing and log out. I imagine it's also frustrating for the people playing to be doing so on a server that is likely to be down as often as it is up. Unfortunately, this was a case of bad timing; hardware failures happen, and I have business to do. Some things take priority over Minecraft, I'm afraid.

I will resume the server at some point in the future following a series of intermediate upgrades. However, the future incantation will be strictly invitation-only, and only for people I know (friends, former guild mates, etc) who also understand that the machine is hosted from a home office, isn't guaranteed to be available 24/7, and can be taken down at any time for any reason.

If you need a downloadable copy of the world you were working on, please let me know, and I'll provide it. If you need a server that has guaranteed availability, Mojang is running Realms servers for ~3 people starting at $2.99/mo (USD), and you can find an assortment of other servers in the same price range. Many of them allow you to upload your own worlds.

[Zancarius]

The Minecraft server is up but running in a VERY limited capacity. After testing, it appears that the CPU load from recent versions of Spigot is sufficiently high as to make running it somewhat prohibitive on my hardware. This is problematic, because I'm not planning on upgrading my home office file server for quite some time due to current upgrades and a few unexpected (and unrelated) purchases I've had to make. Minecraft isn't like it was a couple of years ago: I could happily keep Minecraft running more or less indefinitely without much CPU load, but as of this writing, it very nearly eats the entirety of a single core for 1-2 people (during chunk loading and initial logon, it'll easily eat both cores on this system). While this doesn't seem to immediately impact other services (beyond increasing response latency), I'm not at all interested in dedicating an entire 1-2 cores for a free service when they could be doing something far more useful.

It's plausible this is due to a combination of the JVM I'm running, the plugins installed, and Spigot itself. I did some testing earlier today and concluded that the plugins alone cannot account for the entirety of the game overhead, and replacing Spigot with PaperMC suggests this may be a combination of the Minecraft core + Spigot (Paper is somewhat less resource hungry but it's not noticeable enough to make a significant difference). Consequently, I've severely limited access to a very small number of people during my test phase. This is unlikely the change for the near future. If you were enjoying your time on the service, I do sincerely apologize. I share some of the blame: I never intended for the server to be publicly accessible--not without validating new users--specifically for this reason.