Early access now available!
For the first time since 2022, EarthMC is resetting to a brand new map. We call the update Terra Nostra. Players with Premium are now 2 days into early access, the perfect opportunity to secure a town location before the map opens to the public May 1 2026. This is truly a unique opportunity as resets are years in between.
Let's take a look at some recent updates.
New hardware
We saw over 700 concurrent players in the same world during launch of early access. In order to accommodate the surge of players an event like this brings, I've managed to secure a much better server, yielding significant performance improvements for the community.
The equation of finding good server hardware has changed since the introduction of Folia two years ago. Traditionally, Minecraft and its server software has been limited to running on a single CPU core. Back then I just had to find the server with the best possible single core performance. Unfortunately, this also meant that one core would be at 100% utilization while the rest sat idle.
Folia, however, allows the server to split up the world into multiple regions. Regions get ticked independently and can run on separate CPU threads. We have a map layer that allows everyone to view active regions, which serves as a nice way to visualize what Folia does in the background. The game server still favors great single core performance though. This means that I now have to find hardware with as many cores/threads as possible, while still having excellent single thread performance.
Before early access, I managed to secure a dedicated server with an AMD EPYC 9575F. It has 64 cores/128 threads and happens to have the highest maximum single-core boost clock (5.0 GHz) of all EPYC CPUs.
| Old hardware | New hardware | |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD 7950X3D | AMD EPYC 9575F |
| Cores | 16 | 64 |
| Threads | 32 | 128 |
| Ram | 128 GB | 382 GB |
Now that we're 2 days in to early access I'm happy to say that the hardware upgrade made it possible to avoid queues altogether. It feels great to know that everyone who paid for Premium could play as much as they wanted, which was the goal.
One small map detail
The new earth map is 4 times as large as the previous one, giving us a solid foundation for the server years to come. I could probably go on forever about improvements to the new map, but that's for a separate blog post. Instead, let's focus on one small change that hopefully goes to show that we've really done our best to think of the small details.
Deserts now have sandstone below ground instead of normal stone blocks like before. This creates a much better overhead view when the top layer of sand eventually gets mined up. It also helps prevent sand shortages with the recently introduce custom stonecutter recipe, 1 sandstone outputs 4 sand.
There's a problem though. Sandstone breaks faster than stone. Specifically, sandstone has a hardness of 0.8. Stone has a hardness of 1.5. Since sandstone is faster to mine, ores are faster to find. To accomodate for this, ore frequency has been reduced by the exact proportion of hardness between stone and sandstone.
Faster rail roads
Veyronity and K1Kimor recently introduced a way to speed up minecarts by placing rails on ice. Packed ice gets you to 20 b/s and blue ice pushes that all the way to 30 b/s. This allows much faster travel compared to vanilla minecarts that only reach speeds of 8 b/s. Compared to boats on ice which is a popular method of travel, this new system enables vertical travel, easier turns and no need to hold the W key to move forward. Personally, I think intricate rail road system looks so much better than ice roads, but that might just be me. K1kimor has posted a video of it in use.
API version 4
Veyronity has been hard at work improving the EarthMC API. The headline addition in version 4 is support for server sent events (SSE), which is a fancy way of saying your app can sit on an open connection and have the server push updates as things happen, rather than hammering our endpoints every few seconds asking "anything new yet?". Clients connect to /events with an API key and pick which events they care about through a ?listen= query parameter, so you only get what you actually subscribed to.
The shop events are probably where this shines brightest for the average player. ShopSoldItem and ShopBoughtItem cover individual transactions, while ShopOutOfStock, ShopOutOfSpace and ShopOutOfGold catch the three ways a shop can quietly stop working while you're offline. Pipe those into a Discord webhook and you'll never again log in to discover your shop has been dead for five days.