User blog comment:LOTRMod/Joetater: A Region Saver/@comment-26172435-20160826224537/@comment-25612015-20160827092317

Hello Alte,

I stumbled upon it, but this tool is apparently intended for people who are using commercial Minecraft hosting.

As I rent my own dedicated machines, I have system level access and thus I had ways to do the same thing right from the start of hARDA (for example, through simple copy commands).

Anyway, the most interesting part of this is the so-called "first part of the process", gathering the list of all player builds (and points of interest too), which is not covered by this tool.

This is something I've been thinking about for some time as hARDA started at beta 21 of the mod, and things have changed a lot since (peculiarly roads and rivers).

Here are the system level approaches I came up with:


 * keeping all region files where a player Travel System custom waypoint is located (trivial, already scriptable)


 * keeping all region files where a protection banner is located (need to update my region scanner tool, but not too complicated)


 * same with chests locked with the Lockette plugin


 * keep all region files where player manufactured blocks are found (a bit more complicated as mod built structures would have to be withdrawn from the list)

And here is an "inside game" approach I thought about:


 * make a additional mod or plugin enabling players to put a new block or some unused block (Goran's one for example) to mark the corners of all places they would like to keep from one version to the other. The four blocks would have to be logically linked to each other, and would cause the area to be noted in a file upon placing the fourth one, and removed upon destroying any of them.

All this leaves the infamous terrain glitches (cliffs) that we have all experienced each time terrain generation algorithms changed.

A first approach for this would be to ask concerned players to smooth the chunks/region borders themselves...

Another one would be to complete my leftover Minecraft Region Importer project, which purpose was to allow people, inside the game through commands, to import whole region files containing [http://User blog:HubToo/Massive structures now! Massive Structures] and automatically smooth region borders.

Although I have stopped playing Minecraft, this is something I've been reconsidering during my summer holidays. I'm still wanting to do it if I can find a little time to code this.