#hexxytest

This post is not about cursed spell circle tech exactly, though. If y'all want to learn more about spell circle tech, my whole guide can be found here. Going back to the main topic, World Slate is the logical extreme of this, taking a spell circle, and scaling to the size of a whole minecraft world. Unfortunately, this is not the real full size minecraft world, but the whole world of HexxyTest (which has a world boarder of 10k to -10k).

Ok, but fine, what does World Slate look like? Well, its main "core" is quite small! Only ~6 blocks, it is just a Looper (a Spell Circle that never ends), a Hex on a pedestal, and a slate to clear the stack. The one in the middle is just my personal Teleportation System that uses Displace, which is free if the entity and vector is in the bounds of the Spell Circle.

The "scary" part of World Slate comes into play when you consider the scale. The small red arrow in the top is the main core of World Slate is, the small line at the top and left side are the ambit rods. Both rods extend out 20,000 blocks in the X and Z directions, placed down with mainly Hex and Sentinel Walking. What this totals to is that a single Spell Circle that has ambit on the Whole World, meaning an "Eye of Sauron" (A hex that can get true names at an instant) is not just a hypothetical, it could be running right now.

So, what were the main challenges of building this? Surprisingly? Building it was almost no problem, after making a quick hex to place the blocks down automatically, it was just spam clicking that. The main problems were with the Spell Circles themselves, or well, how they were implemented. That's right! Its Java time!

So one of the problems I think I covered in the old post was a Memory Leak of sorts Spell Circles had. TLDR: Spell Circles keep a list of vectors to "turn off" when the Spell Circle is finish (so slates can stop glowing and such), but this was a list, not a set. So it would keep adding the same vectors if the same slate got ran over. So my fix was to make that list a set (and keep track of how many slates have been "ran over" via a number)

Another problem was that Spell Circles stored Every slate they could run on. Meaning, for World Slate, it would need to keep ~40,000 Block Positions (or 120,000 integers) in a single block. So I made a quick tweak of it only storing the highest, and lowest, block positions (so it stored the corners, rather than everything). These 2 things are already large performance boosts! But, unfortunately, these are peanuts compared to the main problem. Chunk loading.

When a "copied" (IE: singleplayer with only Hex) World Slate was started up, it would load about 30,000-40,000 chunks when it was looking for Slate to run on. For some context, HexxyTest has ~30,000 chunks loaded at peak hours, with people having tons of chunk loads. So something had to be going strange and or wrong. After poking through the code for a bit, I found the singular problem line:

All this does is ask the Server Level what the block is at "herePos," but under the hood, Minecraft is loading a 14x14 (iirc) cube of chunks around that. Since, if you are loading chunks in most cases, it won't hurt to preload a few more. This is not most cases.

After banging my head on this problem, using a debugger to step through Every part of chunk loading, and getting slapped around silly by this for a week or 2, I found an odd thing, a method called "getChunkFuture." What this does is return an evaluable future that holds a single chunk's data. After poking around, I learned of a way to only load the blocks and as little chunks required.

What this chunk of code does is checks if it has already scanned this chunk, if so, uses the found one! If not, tries to get a future and runs it. While this is not perfect, it MASSIVELY increases chunk loading speed. What used to take ~10 seconds in that singleplayer world, took Two seconds. What used to crash the whole HexxyTest server? 10 seconds at peak hours. 10. Seconds.

Being perfectly honest, I have No Clue why that works; according to Chloe (who helped me test this) that method is used in World Gen only. But I couldn't find any errors or bugs with it in this case, and it has been working well on the HexxyTest server!

After fixing a few bugs, some made by me, some made by Hex (like forgetting the Slate Limit....)

Its ready to be merged into Hex! Right now, the HexxyTest server is using a modified build of Hex that uses this. And it is also sitting as a PR to the main Hex GH Repo too!

Overall, really quite proud of my self for making this whole World Slate system, and optimizing base Hex Casting Spell Circles too! Hopefully this encourages people to use Spell Circles, since they are fun, and extremely useful.

World Slate, The Great Work, Ghost-Circle, "Sophia why the fuck did you even think of making this," whatever you call it; it is a massive Spell Circle that is approximately 11 thousand blocks by 12 thousand blocks large. This covers about 30% of the overworld of the HexxyTest server.

For those who don't know Spell Circle Tech: a Spell Circle calculates ambit based on how big it could be, rather than based on where it does runs. So you can "trick" a Spell Circle into having a massive ambit by having a looping system that connects to outer "prongs" via a directrix. This is how the World Slate has complete ambit over 30% of the whole overworld. However, there is a large problem, lag.

Spell circles (shouldn't) gain lag while running; since they now, in 1.20, run each pattern while going over them. On the other hand, during a start-up a Spell Circle needs to calculate what slate it can run on, caching it into its NBT data. This seems like it could be a large source of lag, since it's doing a flood fill over possibly thousands of blocks; but, that is only half true. If all the slate blocks are in the same loaded area, the flood fill only takes a few milliseconds, barely anything. But, to get the block data to find where the slate could go, it has to load the chunk the slate in, which is not that bad, IF the slate does not go across ~1400 chunks. Loading, and calculating, that many chunks will lag a server badly (maybe even kill it); so the project seems hopeless.

But, there is a way to fix the lag of loading ~1400 chunks in less than a tick, optimizations.

Since I know Java and some bits about modding, I have been trying to fix some more laggy parts of Spell Circles. I have already fixed a moderate lag source of looping Spell Circles (chunk bans are fun!). So it hypothetically shouldn't be too hard to somehow optimize Slate Discovery.

There are 2 large problems with optimizing Slate Discovery though: How to locate them, and how to store the found slate. The 2nd problem is much easier to solve, rather than storing them in a set of raw Vec3s like it does now, it would be best to compress them down (maybe into a string representation or something) then uncompresses them when it is running. This could be done with a small, quick compression algorithm.

However, optimizing the finding of the slate is another problem. The best system would be finding the slate without loading the chunks, but this is impossible, so we need to use a 2nd method.

That 2nd method would be to break up slate discovery over time, so instead of loading ~1400 chunk all at once, we can just load 200 chunks each tick until we get all ~1400 chunks. This system does have some minor problems, and a big problem. The small problems would be: how to keep discovery going if the server closes, how would you serialize the discovery list, how would you tell the impetus to look over time, etc. And these problems are simple enough; however, the big kicker is that the player could move slate during discovery.

As said by Chloe, people could move the slates in discovery, meaning they could cheat the system by moving the slates while they are being scanned, and still get "world ambit" for about fre. This is, unfortunately, just a problem that would have to be accepted for a system like this.

I do think that flaw can be somewhat ignored though. Since, if you are willing to make a Hex (or a massive contraption) that works every tick to move earth-shattering amounts of slate; then you can have world ambit fuck it.

Or you know, instead of doing this whole massive problem if optimizing slate scanning just do something like re-adding the slate limit

Let's go through the buildings in order of when I build them. The first building I built (besides the concrete floor) was my Cake Factory:

Technically it was 2 builds, a wheat farm and the Cake Factory, but meh. So this farm has wheat harvesting, dough production, egg producing, and sugar acquiring, all to form cakes. Sadly, there was a mod in the pack that caused lots of chunk errors (mostly around my base, probably because it was loaded the most lol) and that ate a small amount of my factory, not much, but enough to be an eyesore. "Why", you might be asking, "was your first build a cake factory?" Well it was for 1 simple reason, cakes can be turned into mana, and mana can be turned into delicious energy. But this build can only make cakes, so the next build I made turn them cakes into energy!

I don't know what "style" I was going with, but I just wanted to make a massive energy crystal held up by massive supporting towers, so I made them first, then the main building. Sadly though, due to the chunk errors I was talking about (and a mod being removed) the Create contraption that spun the crystal got voided; however, I did find a screenshot of how it looked before.

Quite nice with the beacon if you ask me. Also, if you look in the first images, you will see a pixel art cake, "mana", and a slightly cut of bit of copper and glowstone, representing energy; these were meant to look like some old symbols on how cake is turned into energy I guess. But what to do with too much energy? (for now) might as well make a workshop.

Using Create: Crafts & Additions's electric motor, I can run this whole workshop with just clean Cake Power. It has many useful Create blocks, however one of the most useful parts of the workshop is my auto smelter.

It's free cooking and smelting as long as the fans have a trickle of rotation, one of the first thing I recommend anyone to build if they are using the Create mod.

The next build I made was my Botania building, I wanted to give it a bit more of a nature feel, so I gave it a little outside patio with trees and bushes. It has about 5 floors of just grass for all plant needs. There is not too much to say about this building, mostly because I have not done too much with Botania, however, it is the first building I use slates for decoration. There are lines of slate for real, working spells, and over to the left, are the names of them. As I was working on all of these builds, my power demand went up and up (mostly due to my storage system being based on AE2), so I had to make a quick stop to make a lava pit to feed some steam engines.

Here is where over 3K FE (forge fabric energy) is made, it uses 3 normal-sized boilers and a massive lava pit, it does not need to be that big, but it looks cool. And I can call it the world's 3rd biggest hot tub as well. As soon as I got this power station running, I was able to finish one of my best builds, the Main Hub.

Cracks fingers, there is a lot to say about this place. First floor is nearly 100% deco, it has one of the first cakes I have ever made with my farm, it also has all the terminals I will ever need for my AE2 system, also also has scrolls out so I can read them and use them easily. A few other things of note for only the first floor; there are items on depots, so I can easily get them there is an outdoor area that will have my mailbox at some point, and it will lead to the (currently as of making this post) WIP living area.

Floor 2 is where all the good-looking automation happens, a large chunk of the floor is covered in ether Create automation, or in auto socking stuff. Also in floor 2 is my transportation crafters:

These are where my train tracks are made, my train casings are made (the sturdy sheets to be specific), and my estrogen patches. A few other things of note on floor 2 are my storage drives, the name says everything you need to know.

Floor 3 does not have much in the way of deco, but it is where my AE2 core is, my autocrafters themselves, and some AE2 circuit crafters as well. Sadly, thats all I have to say about floor 3, not much expect for leftovers.

As of making this post, I have built another large building, its not completely done yet, but the inside and planning is done.

Its going to be an apartment complex, currently unfurnished, but build. Each room has at least 12 cubic meters of space, some bigger, and each room also has a bathroom, at least 4 cubic meters. I cant send more images in this post (due to the limit of 30 per post) but I will send some in the reblogs. Also, a few notes about this building: It will be attached to the main gate of my base, it will have stairways/elevators to get to the higher floors, and there are about 35 rooms at the moment, there will be 36 for a penthouse of my own.