Operations6 min read
World borders and pre-generation, or how to stop paying for empty land
Chunk generation is the most expensive thing a Minecraft server does. Pre-generating inside a border does it once, at a time you choose.
Generating new terrain is the single most expensive operation a Minecraft server performs, and it happens whenever a player walks somewhere nobody has been. On a busy server that is a permanent background cost, paid at the worst moment: while people are online.
Set the border first
A world border is not a restriction so much as a budget. Ten thousand blocks square is a very large world for a small community, and it bounds both the disk the world will ever use and the work the server will ever have to do.
Then generate it once
Pre-generation walks the world inside the border and creates every chunk while nobody is playing. It takes hours and it takes them at three in the morning rather than during a session. Afterwards, exploring is reading from disk instead of computing terrain, and the difference is obvious.
- Set the border before generating, or you will generate land you meant to exclude.
- Expect the world folder to grow; a pre-generated 10k world is several gigabytes.
- Run it from the console with the server otherwise idle.