Puzzling age "issue"

[Ashzification]

Well I could, but you see, tonight is my TV night. It's the night of the week where I am entirely engrossed by fiction. My brain doesn't always work properly on Thursday nights

 

[Vauthil]

No worries, enjoy your fiction night... this is more of a curiosity at this point anyway it sounds like. We could probably make a whole series on the quirks of Mystcraft Ages and other interactions (another to share: don't shoot at your boyfriend with your mining laser in his Giant Trees age, no matter how much he's trolling you. The resulting wildfire will make your server certifiably unhappy). =)

 

[Evil Hamster]

My guess is too many entities causing severe lag. Probably took more than 10 minutes of being froze up to process enough "ticks" to the point entities started disappearing until you were finally able to get back in the game.

 

[Ashzification]

It told me the file may become unusable

 

[Vauthil]

Works a-okay when renamed back here. Seems the forum isn't picky on rules of binary/ASCII transfers and such. Huzzah. =)

Attaching screenshot of what it looks like when run through NBTExplorer so you can see what I see. =)

Let's run through some of what this gibberish means, shall we? I'm going to run through in some detail for folks who may've never looked into this kind of stuff before, so if any of this sounds redundant, don't worry, it is. =)

• InstabilityEnabled is 1. This means if you had instability turned on in your config, this age would be eligible for it. Since you don't this is overriden.
• Visited is 1. You've been there before, so it won't paste some symbols down on it. Congrats! =)
• Instability is 0. Since it's turned off in your config, the score is forced to zero.
• EffectsCount is 0. This would be the number of lovely effects your age has based on all the instability stuff. Again 0, but if this was hire you would also have parameters for different effects listed.
• SpawnX, SpawnY, SpawnZ identify spawn-in point for the Age (164, 89, -252).
• SymbolCount tells us there are 30 symbols on this Age. This is a "complex" Age!
• Seed tells us the Age's Minecraft Seed. I could start an age like this without copying in the file with this if I got creative. =)
• AgeName is Forest. Better than some of the things I call my Ages.

Then we get into the list of symbols, which can tell us some of the risk factors:

• Symbols 0 &1 (yes, java is often like a bad shonen manga and decides 0 is the first number to count): It's a Single Biome. That Biome is Forest. By itself this isn't nasty, although you might have a propensity on first coming in for every leaf block in a decent radius to actually start checking whether it should be attached to logs once you start chopping. Age Generation also gets a little derpy when trees are generated over various protrusions in the landscape and this can cause some rethinking on the part of the game on "am I a tree?" (how very existential, I know).
• Symbol 2: Lighting is Bright. This doesn't mean that lighting calculations aren't being conducted by the game, by the way; it just means that visually you don't see the results of any of that. This may come into play later. All the math is still being done on the part of the game to determine viability for mob spawning and such.
• Symbols 3-9: your sky color/sunset color/cloud color stuff. This shouldn't be that nasty though because it's not like Minecraft actually emits colored light, so I wouldn't think this'll cause that issue. (you have some manner of light magenta sky in the composite result I'm guessing? With light blue clouds and a different fog color every time you visit? Sunset's irrelevant for the reason below.)
• Symbols 10-18: 9 Village symbols. This can cause some oddity on generation with the combination of Forest, but I haven't put that many Villages symbols on an active world to see how it turns out. If you had some really awesome trees or if your terrain was more irregular it might've been more fun to see. =)
• Symbol 19: Star Fissure. You may want to locate your Star Fissure and see how much, if anything is falling into it. For example, if maybe there's an overhang that basically has made an ad hoc mob spawner right by your Star Fissure; the settings on your world make it so that the game has very few places to spawn mobs directly, so any region of darkness like that could be pretty dense, and a number of entities falling through your Star Fissure may make your game agitated (check your home spawn as well to see if you suddenly have a small army and/or pile of dead monster parts assembled there). Since you don't have any water symbols I wouldn't expect you to have the oh-so-startling "there's a squad of squid flailing on my spawn point!" issue, at least. =)
• Symbols 20-22: Glowstone Crystals. And here's where you keep in mind the rule from above: even though you aren't seeing any light fluctuations, the game is still constantly doing the math and this is at the least a lag culprit if not an eats-your-memory culprit (Minecraft isn't know for its superb lighting after all). It also provides some of the lovely protrusions that could set off trees getting their existential angst ("Am I a tree?") on, right in the middle of your processor.
• Symbols 23: Flat. Usually a happier symbol for this kind of stuff; it removes a lot of the bumps that can make trees get existential. Of course, Flat has a nasty habit of making a world of arbitrary height: looking above, yours seems to be around 89 high, which means you have a fair number of blocks under your feet (I've had Flats going up to 127 and down into the 40s), but nothing ridiculous.
• Symbols 24 and 25: Eternal Day and No Weather. No Weather is always a good choice for minimizing video-related lag, so at least we know you shouldn't be seeing that going on.
• Symbols 26-29: Dense Ores. As a note, a single Dense Ores is usually fairly okay performance wise. Once you get past 3 of them (we have 4 here), it can start taxing your system a fair bit: Minecraft fudges a bit, it seems, when you only have a lot of smooth stone under your feet, and suddenly finds itself doing a lot more than it expects when you change all that stone to ores. That said, this may impact loading as you enter the Age and as you move around and chunks are loaded/generated, but probably isn't causing you to splatter after 10 minutes of just hanging around. If this were SMP, though, and you had friends connecting to it from, say, Southeast Asia, they may end up trapped and unable to leave this world without a quick /tpx out in the five or so seconds they can connect because the minecraft server simply can't feed the topology data to their client fast enough for it to be happen and it cuts the stream and they disconnect.

Your main "risk factors", I would say, are the Glowstone Crystals (lots of lighting calculations going on under the hood for lighting you don't even see), the multiple Dense Ores (lots of uncompressed data to hold resident), the Star Fissure (depending on how secure it is and if there's anything taking a swan dive through it), and the fact that it's one big Forest and you're using TreeCapitator (still shouldn't be bad for standing-still operations once it's calmed down).

There may be other stuff people can glean from the list, but you don't have any of the really huge offenders (Cave World, Wooden Tendrils, Giant Trees, Meteors) going on. I would probably not pick a Forest as the biome if you want to make this a quarrying age, by that's my personal mileage varying. My usual go-to for Dense Ores ages are Mushroom Biomes, since they not only negate the "oh my god where is some shade so I can spawn mobs" calculations going on (Mushrooms = no mobs, you can safely have a Bright Age and not have to worry about torches in your excavations), but mushrooms really don't really give a damn if a crystal formation or village sprouts up in a middle of them and won't go all angsty about their virtual lives on you because of it.

 

[Rikki21]

You could try this mod called Stackie.

Description: "It will group all items of the same type and experience orbs into stacks of maximum size. For example: 6 towers, 64 high of sand will give you 384 entities. With this mod I ended up with only 15. Cool, eh?"

I'm currently using this mod with treecapitator. I just recently got rid of a Fir wood tree biome (pretty tall freaking trees) and I had minimal lag when they all came crashing down. I'm on a crappy laptop as well so it may work for you, that is if the entities were the issue with your crash.

 

[Zelfana]

Yeah Stackie can help. The vanilla stacking mechanism isn't good enough. TreeCapitator can cause a lot of lag since the CPU is calculating so much withing a single tick, first it calculates the area of blocks to take out and then their drops. You could set up a powered obsidian pipe to help, too. That gives me the idea that there needs to be a tool that would do the same thing.