SpigotMC / Minecraft plugin that keeps ticking chunks
When all players move away further than the server viewing distance from a chunk then mobs in that chunk including villagers will stop moving, and crops will stop growing. These activities depend on what is called "random ticks" which are sent only to chunks within viewing distance of at least one player.
This plug-in allows you to mark chunks for which you would like those "random ticks" to continue being sent, despite no player being near. For this, the plug-in introduces the "/tickchunks" (or /tc for short) command. Used with the sub-command "keep" or "k" for short the command will mark the chunk the player is currently in such that this chunk will keep receiving random ticks. Using with the sub-command "release" or "r" for short, the player's current chunk will be released from this mechanism.
When used in conjunction with the "KeepChunks" plug-in (see https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/keepchunks.23307/) this plug-in will automatically request that chunks marked with /tickchunks are also kept loaded using the KeepChunks plug-in.
Technical note: this plug-in depends on a Spigot feature that is yet to be released with the standard Spigot version. See https://hub.spigotmc.org/jira/browse/SPIGOT-3747 which describes the feature request, and https://hub.spigotmc.org/stash/projects/SPIGOT/repos/spigot/pull-requests/78/overview which describes the pull request that contains the Bukkit/CraftBukkit extensions required by this plug-in. Clone https://[email protected]/stash/scm/~donaldduck70/spigot.git if you have access to the Spigot Hub, or https://github.com/axeluhl/SPIGOT-3747.git for everyone else; grab the correct patches for SPIGOT-3747 for Bukkit and CraftBukkit, either from the corresponding Stash repositories at https://[email protected]/stash/scm/~donaldduck70/Bukkit.git and https://[email protected]/stash/scm/~donaldduck70/CraftBukkit.git, respectively (or get it from Github if you don't have a Stash account; see below) and checkout SPIGOT-3747, download BuildTools.jar and run them. See also https://www.spigotmc.org/wiki/buildtools/.
If on windows, start with this:
git config --global --replace-all core.autocrlf true
Then continue like this:
mkdir <my-spigot-dir>
cd <my-spigot-dir>
git clone https://github.com/axeluhl/SPIGOT-3747.git Spigot
git clone https://github.com/axeluhl/Bukkit.git
git clone https://github.com/axeluhl/CraftBukkit.git
wget "https://hub.spigotmc.org/jenkins/job/BuildTools/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/target/BuildTools.jar"
Also, on Windows, make sure not to use Cygwin for the following because the autocrlf setting from above will cause scripts to contain CR characters which the Cygwin bash doesn't like.
java -jar BuildTools.jar --dont-update
This will give a spigot-X.YY.Z.jar with the necessary patches in place in your <my-spigot-dir> directory.
To build this plug-in against the Spigot JAR create as per the instructions above clone this plug-ins Git
repository and import into Eclipse. Go to the project's "Java Build Path" settings and set the variable
Spigot to your choice for <my-spigot-dir> above. The project should then build without errors because
the spigot-X.YY.Z.jar file that you build before should be found by Eclipse.
Next, double-click the createjar.jardesc file in the project. It will create the TickChunks.jar file in your
Eclipse workspace directory. Move the resulting TickChunks.jar file to your server's plugins/ directory.
This is assuming that your server runs off the spigot-X.YY.Z.jar compiled above.
Feedback to [email protected]. Have fun.