Routes

A second beta of Routes 2.0: roads are planned in a fraction of the time, a reopened world remembers its towns and roads, and the land around a new spawn gets its roads. 🧪

⚠️ This is a beta. It has not had its full in-game test pass yet. Back up your world before you update, and tell us on Discord or GitHub if anything looks wrong.

⚠️ Changed

• The settings that shape the road network are fixed for each world. Changing one mid-world (the longest road, roads per town, town and city sizes, ring roads, curviness, slope, road width, straight bridges, which structures get connected, or the landmark settings) gave the land generated afterwards a second network whose roads stopped short of the old ones. A world now keeps the values it was created with: /routes config set saves the new value for the worlds you create next and says so, and /routes config list marks these settings. A world you already have keeps the values it uses today.
• New worlds pregenerate 512 chunks around spawn by default, down from 1024: enough for the spawn town and its first road out, in about two thirds of the time. Worlds you already have keep their value.
• "Generate routes" off means no roads planned ahead and no spawn moved into a town. The spawn stays where the game puts it, and creating the world skips the town search.

🚀 Faster worlds

• A reopened world remembers its towns and its roads. The town survey and the plan of every road already drawn are saved inside the world and read back as it opens, so reopening no longer pays for them again. Both are thrown away and rebuilt on their own when a mod, a datapack or the world's road settings change; deleting the files only costs time.
• Roads are planned much sooner. Landmarks along the way are looked up once and several at a time, the towns at a road's ends are sized while the road is planned, and the ground under it is read on several threads at once. On a test walk through new land, roads finished planning in about half the time. The roads are exactly the same.
• Finding the towns of a new area is faster. A town is confirmed from its first building and laid out in full only when a road depends on its size or its edge.
• Routes looks for towns only where you are about to go, not in a wide square around every player.
• Shaping the ground under a road takes over a thousand times less work per road chunk, and the ground comes out the same, block for block.
• Background road work no longer piles up or waits on itself. Each survey or plan is queued once, and a town search that another mod makes fail is not repeated by every chunk around it.
• Work Routes used to repeat is now done once: which structures count as towns and landmarks, where two roads cross, whether each fork stands on solid footing, and whether a tree would stand on a road, which no longer gets slower as the world grows.
• The zone banner no longer gets slower with every area you discover.
• New road paint lands on your map without redoing the whole map: about half a millisecond per update on a map with 50,000 painted chunks, down from 12 ms with spikes past 30.
• The server keeps its road map in a quarter of the memory, and long sessions forget only the oldest ground heights instead of measuring everything again.
• Walking along a numbered route no longer re-queues all of its signs: they are written once, when the route gets its number.

🐛 Fixes

• Roads, signs and terrain shaping reach the land around a new world's spawn. The chunks Minecraft generates before the world opens were made before Routes was ready, so a road crossing them stopped at their edge and started again on the other side.
• A dedicated server pregenerates a new world's spawn from the first join, using its own config file, instead of waiting for an operator to run /routes config set.
• A road between far-apart towns no longer stops in the middle of nowhere where a long chain of towns was linked two different ways. Worlds you already have keep their roads.
• Cancelling Create New World no longer leaves its ROUTES choices behind for the next world or server you open.
• Your world's road map file saves the same way every time, so backups stop seeing a new routes_gen2_map.dat on every save.

🔧 For server owners

• The road network is now tested automatically across twenty worlds, including worlds whose towns sit far apart.
• Each planned road logs what its time went to, and the headless benchmark times the town survey in parts and runs a first join's spawn pregeneration with nobody joining.
• A leftover manual Discord workflow is gone, and with it one more copy of the bot's key.