Peon

Peon 1.4.20

Server owners: take this one and skip everything between 1.4.9 and 1.4.19. A day of production incidents, each with its own fix, all of them in here.

The server no longer dies

• No terrain is ever written in a sleeping chunk. Decorating the avenue, the woods and the village used to read and write blocks kilometres from any player, which forces chunk generation on the server thread until the watchdog kills it. Every decorator now checks that the chunk is already loaded and skips otherwise. A missing tree twelve kilometres away is invisible; a dead server is not.
• The avenue remembers how far it reaches (saved with the world), only the new stretch is built, at most once every ten seconds, and only when a real player needs it. The full rebuild is now an operator-only command.
• A cleanup routine removed entities while iterating them, which throws inside the tick loop and shuts the server down cleanly, so it stayed down. Fixed in two places.

Throwaway accounts

• Plots left behind by throwaway accounts are erased. At boot, every plot with no owner who ever swung a pickaxe is put back to flat meadow, one chunk per tick so the server never stalls, and marked done in the save so it runs once.
• "Has played" now means "has swung the pickaxe". The login streak bonus used to count as earnings, so a bot that stayed one second looked like a player forever, kept its plot, and pushed the avenue out. Empty plots are forgotten every forty seconds and at boot, never for someone who is online.
• Login attempts are capped at three per address per minute.

Cleaner ground, cleaner sky

• Dropped items are swept every forty seconds (fifteen seconds of grace to pick them up), silently unless the pile was large. Ender dragons, withers and hostile mobs found in the quarry are removed too, and named in the log.
• The shop no longer drops a purchase on the ground when your inventory is full: the purchase is refused and nothing is charged.
• The Alley train no longer flickers: it is only placed on loaded ground, at most once per second, and the sweeper spares the live convoy.

Fairness

• After a server freeze, the client sends everything it queued in one burst. Rate guards now stand down for three seconds after any long tick, so honest players stop being kicked for lag. Guard warnings expire instead of stacking all evening.
• Three disconnect screens had their emblem redrawn; they showed as a pale block.