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Comment by vanilla_nut | Hacker News Reader

Just how high can a minecraft server scale in player number? I know the worlds are effectively infinite (well, until you get so far out that the terrain generation algorithms actually start to break in the Edgelands), so space isn't an issue... I definitely used servers with hundreds or even thousands of players in the 2000s, so they can scale relatively high in a single instance. I wonder if a clustered minecraft instance could scale effectively infinitely, as long as they synced time?

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Based on this paper from 2014 [0], you're probably gonna hit resource limits in the late thousands unless you apply some special techniques. Apparently the highest number of players that's been seen on a minecraft server simultaneously is somewhere around 10 000, but I don't know the details of this.

[0] https://exaquark.com/blog/scaling-minecraft-to-millions-of-u...

Yeah but if you rewrite a Minecraft server to scale it would probably be possible. The Vanilla minecraft server runs on 1 thread and is written in Java so there is a lot of space for improvement.

Indeed. Some years ago a friend of mine wrote a Minecraft server in Golang and it ran on something ridiculous like 10MB of RAM with genuinely excellent performance.

It could definitely be done.

by limiting the data to only send and recieve changes in the local area you could probably scale it to a very large number of users, especially since latency isn't a super high concern for building. the part i think is difficult to solve is how to protect people's builds from vandalism while still keeping to the idea of a shared creative server. most public servers of minecraft i saw seem to have this problem, atleast thats the way it was when i played it a long time ago

In my experience this was never a huge problem -- if I remember correctly, servers I played on actually had some ability to "own" areas of the server so you were the only one with edit privileges for that area. And of course there's always the idea of hiding your construction underground or underwater somewhere hard to find :)

From what I understand edit privileges were done using server admin/moderation tools, not sure how well that scales to big mmo type world with thousands of players, especially when you want people to collaborate on big builds.

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