Help/Regenerating Chunks

Whenever the LotR mod updates, all kinds of cool new content is added. But, if you have already generated a lot of chunks, you will not get to experience some of this new content in your old terrain.

The simplest way to deal with this is to simply explore more terrain; generally, only a small percentage of the potential chunks in a world will ever have been generated. But if you generated a lot of chunks and you wish to have those regenerated while keeping your builds safe, there is a way.

Whole world replacement (with exceptions for builds)

First, back up your world.

Next, go to your LotR directory (or .minecraft) and follow the following path:

LOTR > saves > [World name] > MiddleEarth > region

Inside that folder, you should see a whole bunch of region files (.mca extension). Their names correspond to coordinates on your map.

Now, find the coordinates of all the builds you want to save and use this website to find out which .mca files correspond to your builds. Write down the names of these files.

More easily, if the WorldEdit plugin or mod is installed on your server, just use its /chunkinfo command to know the name of the region file you are in.

Next, delete all the .mca files in the region folder EXCEPT the names you wrote down.

Finally, load your world and check on your builds. If something's missing, your build might be taking up more than one .mca file. In that case, find the coordinates of the missing part of your build, and re-introduce that .mca file from your backup (just copy it over).

This procedure may be tedious, but it'll be far less tedious than rebuilding Minas Tirith from the ground up!

The downside of this approach is that you could have differences of height in the terrain at chunks borders.

To minimise these "terrain glitches", you could keep the previous procedure for major builds and try the following one for smaller builds:

• make saves of the builds in schematic file format, using WorldEdit (server admin) or the Schematica mod (players),
• after chunk regeneration, re-import the schematic files (server admin. Whether made by the admin or a player), or rebuild using them as templates (players).

Partial world replacement

New versions of the mod will often only affect a specific part of MiddleEarth. For example, Meneltarma, Erebor, Mount Doom, etc.

In this case, you could just identify the region files of these parts of Middle Earth, make a backup of them, verify you do not have player's builds inside and delete them. A possibly very handy tool to help server admins in this process is Joetater:

Joetater

This mod adds two new commands. The one we will be looking at is /joetate. It allows you to define an area in-game and automatically backs up all region-files within that area to a separate "joetater" folder found within your world folder. Repeat this for every build, then you can delete the world and copy back the Joetated region files from their folder, restoring the builds while providing new terrain around them. Sorted!

For more information about this mod, as well as a download link, visit the joetater page.

Dealing with corrupted chunks

You can use the same procedure to deal with corrupted chunks, or you can also use the WorldEdit //regen command.