CDU DevLog #2: Behind the servers, around the community

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Hey everyone,

Welcome back to Around CDU. This fortnight, we’ve been developing performance patches for our modpacks and automating more of the work involved in updating, moving and launching servers. There’s also progress on vote rewards, guild spaces and The Clearing.

Performance patches built for our modpacks

A major part of our work has been developing a performance coremod built around a shared library of patches for individual mods. Each modpack gets the patches relevant to its own mix of mods, targeting the code responsible for expensive crafting, machine processing and other server workloads.

This lets us work on the particular problems within each pack. Our patches cover areas such as recipe searches, storage operations, item and energy networks, chunk loading and colony systems. We’ve also been adapting existing patches as mod versions change.

We’re already seeing measurable improvements. In one controlled server benchmark with three MineColonies colonies, median tick time fell from 19.06 ms to 16.34 ms, a 14.3% reduction. Memory allocated per tick fell by 47.8% in the same comparison.

Where the affected mods are open source and there’s an appropriate route to contribute, we also plan to submit recommendations to their upstream developers. We’d like those improvements to benefit players beyond our own servers.

Automating updates, migrations and launches

We’ve rolled out automated tooling for modpack updates, server migrations and new launches. These jobs have taken a considerable amount of hands-on work, especially migrations. Previously, sauramel handled those alone, and a migration could take all day.

They weren’t everyday jobs, but they were difficult to fit around everything else. Automating more of that process has been a major focus, reducing the manual work involved in keeping packs updated, moving servers and preparing new launches.

Following through on vote rewards

We’ve worked on recovering vote rewards when a payment is interrupted. That includes keeping track of individual rewards that are still owed and outstanding rewards from vote parties.

The recovery work preserves those pending rewards across retries and restarts, with checks to prevent the same reward being paid twice. It addresses the gap where a vote has been recorded but the reward hasn’t finished going through.

Guild spaces and community fixes

Guild spaces have received some attention around the website. Guild crests and clearer “Open guild space” buttons make them easier to find, with shortcuts in the site menus as well. We’ve also fixed links that could break after a guild was renamed.

Other website fixes this fortnight include:

• Fixing a “Continue to payment” button that could become unclickable while the basket was open.

• Giving signup errors clearer messages and keeping entered form details when someone needs to retry.

We’ve also continued developing tools to help staff investigate reports and review the relevant evidence.

The Clearing

Island-drop events now adjust the number of pressure plates to the active group when the event starts. Normal and lava modes use between three and nine plates, excluding AFK players. Platforms that aren’t needed stay lit.

We’ve also worked on a confusing fishing message. A full fish pouch could incorrectly produce a warning about bait. The corrected message tells you to sell or place a fish to make room.

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If you’ve found a problem on one of the servers, let us know which pack and version you’re playing, what happened, and how to make it happen again. Those details help us investigate.

Thanks for reading. Around CDU returns on Sunday, 1 November.