Limiting crops on GregTech Servers

Sampsa

Lately a lot of people have been doing IC2 crops on the Ironman GregTech server, which absolutely tanks the TPS of the server with the massive amount (thousands) of entities that need to constantly update. (I am guilty of this as well)

I have a suggestion for this, as follows:

Have a central, Admin-protected structure with creative vending drawers for ALL crop produce
All players that want to automate crops in large amounts can instead submit these seeds (With the required ore/metal blocks) to review for access into the creative drawers
Depending on the stats and amount of crops, they would get a variable passive income of the crops from the drawers (Could be done with GT Conveyors, or with an OpenComputers script [Which I am willing to write])
All players with access are given a single personal ender chest, that is linked inside the structure and to which all crop produce will be fed (A single ender chest is nothing but a hardy chest without a pair, which you need IV tier to get)
The player can extract these items at a steady rate from the paired ender chest at their own base.

Effects of this:
Positive:

No mass amounts of crops on anyone means no TPS lag from thousands of crops
Player bases would lag less (Crops are FPS lag heavy aswell)

Neutral:

Players still need to breed the seeds and get the required blocks to get access (Just like normally farming)

Negative:

More admin work to update access; I could write a OpenComputer script so this could be updated with a Discord Server command
No energy, water or fertilizer expended on the produce (Very minimal, maybe 20-200 EU/t, fertilizer is produced by crops anyways)
Would need to give out an ender chest for possibly Steam tier players (Not a huge thing either, they cannot do anything with it before making a pair, which needs IV+, at which point they are cheap to make anyways)

Also, this change would be a preventive one, instead of a reactive one. Currently the amount of crops is not large enough to cause the ticktimes we are seeing.

Sampsa

Now, I haven't done any extensive testing of the crop lag, so if this seems like too much work for unknown amounts of gain, I understand.

The_Lame_Guy

I agree with this. Crops are getting to become a bigger thing on the GTNH servers(Mainly IM). And as time goes on most likely more people/teams are going to be wanting to be doing crops(More then 2 teams). But like Samp said the you would bread said crop then do something like the member app and then be givin those said crops in your Echest that is givin to you by the admin. I would be personally okay with doing this manually maybe once a day or something like that. But a program with Open computers would be pretty cool.

ConsumerOfBean

Would be pretty cool. Probably need to do more research into seeing just how helpful it would actually be, though.

Seeane

Seems cool, if the crops are the cause of the lag.

JokoJose

i like the idea, because as server grow, more people will want to do bunch of crops, meaning that at some point the server will be unplayable.

Luisomar_85

I love the idea, that way people wont need to build enormous farms that could lag the server but they would still prove they actually can grow these plants.

john01dav

Has anyone used a profiling tool (ideally warmroast + sampler) to determine if crops are indeed the cause of the lag? If so, what alternatives, if any, exist to fix the lag? I can think of a few (more restrictive chunk loading so fewer crops are loaded, some way to make crops grow faster like bonemeal, and an attempt to thread the crops as has already worked on MC.Eternal)..

Hegemon

The same logic can be applied to mining and even machines. Power cables need up dates conduits and pipes need updates AE needs updates power loops cause lag if you do not design properly. Monster spawner's get jambed and cause lag. This makes no allowance for biome, having to manage your crops having to manage weeds having to manage hydration nutrients air quality etc it takes a huge amount out of the game. It starts to sound and feel like playing creative. A much easier fix is take the multi block farms out of the game.

Sampsa

They are most likely not the source of the lag as of now; The amounts are still fairly tame (Maybe around ₁₀₀₀ crops total), but will fairly quickly rise as people start looking into them. I personally noticed a 14ms decrease in ticktime on my private server after unloading 3500 crops + the machinery for processing the produce, which I am aware is not proper profiling.

For the alternatives:
Making chunkloading more restrictive would hurt the pack in other ways more than it would help here. Most people already have vertical farms, so either you cannot chunkload that at all, causing problems with loading miners, among other things, or you can chunkload a very limited amount, which wouldn't really matter for the farms, as you only need like 2x2 for a decent sized farm.

Making crops grow faster (or increasing yield) would also be a decent option, even if it made the process of getting the seeds easier, although the hard part is achieving a seed, not duplicating it. Not sure how to implement this, though.

Threading the crops would be an ideal solution, if that's possible at all.

The_Lame_Guy

Ill be running Opis sometime tonight

MeniMeni

During my testing on the server, even with 1,000s of IC2 crops, their impact has been incredibly low. Single digit nanoseconds each.

Unless this becomes an apparent problem in the future, I don't think this will be implemented.