I had a bad minecraft week :(

[Larmonade]

So I spent quite a long time fooling around in my creative super-fort just to kind of figure out the systems in the various mods, since I was new to FTB. After finally getting a good grasp on it all, I decided it was time to jump into some actual survival-world starting from scratch.

I found a nice location, got my machines up and going, had a nice power room, half a dozen advanced Solars, and even a fledgling ME network. I decided to head to the nether to pump some lava into my railcraft tank to boost my power production to the next level. Hooked up the tesseracts, started filling the tank, game crashes. Load it back up - chunk reset. Engine room, gone. Machine room, gone. Lava tank, half gone. ME network completely intact except for the block with all my ME storage drives on it. Ugh...start a new world.

Find a nice open plain. Maybe this time I'll do a bit more of a sprawling "town" design. Sounds fun. Decide to cheat in some basic stuff to "catch up" to where I'd been. I'm setting up my lava tank and tesseract and ender-thermic pump in the nether. You can probably guess what happens next. Chunk reset. Engine room and half the lava tank and a bunch of my machines gone. Again. Start a new world...again.

Start a new world. Still a bit frustrated, but found a sweet "sacred spring" biome with awesome vivid green to start in. I feel a bit better. I do a bit less cheating this time, mostly just to make up for lost time. No nether pump this time - crucible+magma pumps+geothermic generator should do it without resetting my chunks. Slightly less power, but oh well. I decide to dig a nice long stairway down to level 12 to get my mining operation started. Around level 35, crippling lag, crash. Reload - everything intact. Go back down to finish the tunnel. Crippling lag, crash. Load up MCEdit, take a look around. Pretty epic cave system nearby, but nothing else of note. Log back in, switch to creative and fly over to the coordinates above my tunnel. Crippling lag, crash. This goes on, I figure out that for whatever reason, travelling too far to the west causes te game to crash. WTH. Rage quit.

So I'm now on my next world. So far so good, but...man. I feel a strong sense of impending doom, like the game's gonna screw me, and it's just a matter of time. Not a good feeling, though I suppose it's a labor of love, as a full-on base will all the stuff is something I'm willing to work to. But dang, yo.

So - how about you lot? Ever have just "one of those weeks" in the world of minecraft?

 

[Ashzification]

I'm a bit too methodical in the way I do things. Since I try to test as much as I can while still enjoying the game, I've learned to keep things separate. Every time I make a new "room" I make sure it's in a different chunk from the last.
Thaumcraft, IC2, MFR, Ars Magicka, Mystcraft, Twilight Forrest...
Each get their own chunk, just in case of a reset.
Last chunk reset I had was some time last year with the first of the beta packs, after that I keep mods away from other mods

I usually have to start over because of world corruption, since I'm testing lots of stuff all the time, and it's usually dev builds or kind of buggy builds, I reset a lot XD

 

[Enigmius1]

A lot of the crashing last week up to Friday was caused by the buggy implementation of mobs wearing IC2 armor. It was supposed to be some sort of Halloween "Easter Egg". I personally dislike it when mod devs add 'Easter Eggs' like that. (I almost dislike it even more when they call them Easter Eggs, because they're not Easter Eggs. Easter Eggs are supposed to be hidden, waiting to be found. That's why they're called "Easter Eggs" and not "Suprise In Your Face Crashing Your Game Things")

But I digress...

A bad Minecraft week for me is finding the project I've spent the last two weeks on is no longer viable because of cumulative bugs in the mod(s) being used.

Best a person can do is learn from it and try to avoid duplicating the same situations.

 

[Tyrindor]

Backup your worlds bro... Why do you keep falling for the same mistakes? I've personally never experienced a chunk reset, but I still backup my server/world every 3 hours or so of playing. There's programs that can do it for you too.

http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Programs_and_editors/Backup_utilities

Also if your crashing that much it was either due to the Halloween stuff, or if it's still happening you should look into fixing it. Maybe you need to allocate more RAM, increase your permagen size, or get more physical RAM? Maybe your RAM isn't stable and causing world corruption? This type of stuff usually only happens on beta packs.

 

[Yusunoha]

Backup your worlds bro... Why do you keep falling for the same mistakes? I've personally never experienced a chunk reset, but I still backup my server/world every 3 hours or so of playing. There's programs that can do it for you too.

http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Programs_and_editors/Backup_utilities

Also if your crashing that much it was either due to the Halloween stuff, or if it's still happening you should look into fixing it. Maybe you need to allocate more RAM, increase your permagen size, or get more physical RAM? Maybe your RAM isn't stable and causing world corruption? This type of stuff usually only happens on beta packs.

Forge Backup is still my favorite backup tool, as you actually install it as a mod and it backups your worlds while you're playing.
sadly it's not updated for 1.6

 

[Tyrindor]

Forge Backup is still my favorite backup tool, as you actually install it as a mod and it backups your worlds while you're playing.
sadly it's not updated for 1.6

I've started using a custom bat file that runs in the background when I play minecraft. It automatically backs up the server every 30 minutes and is more reliable then waiting for programs/mods to update.

 

[Yusunoha]

I've started using a custom bat file that runs in the background when I play minecraft. It automatically backs up the server every 30 minutes and is more reliable then waiting for programs/mods to update.

sadly my coding knowledge is so small you wouldn't even find it with a magnifying glass

 

[Juanitierno]

I've started using a custom bat file that runs in the background when I play minecraft. It automatically backs up the server every 30 minutes and is more reliable then waiting for programs/mods to update.

Tyrindor: How do you manage to make snapshots of the files? World files must be in use most of the time... how do you handle concurrency?

 

[Tyrindor]

Tyrindor: How do you manage to make snapshots of the files? World files must be in use most of the time... how do you handle concurrency?

Here's my automatic bat file:

@title=Backup Script
(
SET /p COUNTER=
) < Progress.txt
if not exist file location\Progress.txt ECHO TYPE nul>Progress.txt
if not exist file location\Progress.txt ECHO 0 > Progress.txt
PING 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 180000 > NUL
:loop
SET /a COUNTER=%COUNTER%+1
ECHO %COUNTER% > Progress.txt
RD /s /q "C:\Users\Ben\Desktop\Minecraft\Backups\%COUNTER%"
IF %COUNTER% == 51 SET /a COUNTER=1
XCOPY /y "C:\Users\Ben\Desktop\Minecraft\Server\world\*" "C:\Users\Ben\Desktop\Minecraft\Backups\%COUNTER%\world" /i /s
XCOPY /y "C:\Users\Ben\Desktop\Minecraft\Server\world_nether\*" "C:\Users\Ben\Desktop\Minecraft\Backups\%COUNTER%\world_nether" /i /s
PING 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 1800000 > NUL
goto loop

Here it is with brackets to easily change for other setups:

@title=Backup Script
(
SET /p COUNTER=
) < Progress.txt
if not exist file location\Progress.txt ECHO TYPE nul>Progress.txt
if not exist file location\Progress.txt ECHO 0 > Progress.txt
PING 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 180000 > NUL
:loop
SET /a COUNTER=%COUNTER%+1
ECHO %COUNTER% > Progress.txt
RD /s /q "[ENTER YOUR BACKUP DIRECTORY]\%COUNTER%"
IF %COUNTER% == 51 SET /a COUNTER=1
XCOPY /y "[ENTER YOUR SERVER DIRECTORY]\world\*" "[ENTER YOUR BACKUP DIRECTORY]\%COUNTER%\world" /i /s
XCOPY /y "[ENTER YOUR SERVER DIRECTORY]\world_nether\*" "[ENTER YOUR BACKUP DIRECTORY]\%COUNTER%\world_nether" /i /s
PING 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 1800000 > NUL
goto loop

Don't worry if you get directory does not exist errors on these:
if not exist file location\Progress.txt ECHO TYPE nul>Progress.txt
if not exist file location\Progress.txt ECHO 0 > Progress.txt

What it does is creates a file called Progress.txt, to monitor where it left off in-between sessions. It will wait 3 minutes before performing the first backup, then waits 30 minutes inbetween the next ones. It waits by doing a single ping to 1.1.1.1 (which will never exist), and then waits X milliseconds for a response.

2 Potential problems with the automatic version:
- Make sure you launch it the same time you start the server. If you launch it at another time, there's a rare chance the backup script and server autosave may line up, which I could see causing backups for that session to be corrupted.
- Character's inventories may be slightly out of sync with the world.

Let me know how it works for you...

---

Alternatively here's a manual bat file that backups the entire server folder and names them as backup_1, backup_2, etc to the directory specified:

@title=Backup Script
(
SET /p COUNTER=
) < Progress.txt
if not exist file location\Progress.txt ECHO TYPE nul>Progress.txt
if not exist file location\Progress.txt ECHO 0 > Progress.txt
SET /a COUNTER=%COUNTER%+1
ECHO %COUNTER% > Progress.txt
RD /s /q "C:\Users\Ben\Desktop\Minecraft\Backups\%COUNTER%"
IF %COUNTER% == 51 SET /a COUNTER=1
XCOPY /y "C:\Users\Ben\Desktop\Minecraft\Server\*" "C:\Users\Ben\Desktop\Minecraft\Backups\%COUNTER%\" /i /s

What you can do with this one is do a save-all command to your server, then click this file. This will ensure the files are synced, even if you are still playing. Only 3 directories to change on this one.

I prefer the manual method, because I like to choose when to backup. The automatic backup is set to only backup the world files (to save space), while this one is set to backup everything. Having everything backed up is handy when FTB updates and it screws up your world, making it easier to roll back to the old FTB version.

There's many slight alterations I can do, so if someone needs something slightly different let me know. These can easily be used for other games too, just change the backup and saved game locations. I use them for Terraria too.