The hardcore technical folks seem to prefer things that don't alter the vanilla mechanics quite as much as Paper, it's true. But FWIW there are lots of farm and redstone designs that work reliably on Paper.
(Disclaimer: I'm on the Paper team, and Paper is the org under which Folia sits)
I didn't watch the stream because I was offline when it happened, but I just want to note that the test was run by someone not on the Paper team who got tubbo to stream it, which is how they got so many players. It can be tricky to get enough players for such a large test, so it made sense for cubxity to pair up with someone to get more players.
Twitch can get pretty funky, especially twitch chat, so hopefully there's nothing "bad" in that video, though.
(Disclaimer: I'm on the Paper team, and Paper is the org under which Folia sits.)
This is true to an extent, yes. Chunk generation can be real tough. That said, chunk generation has been re-written in Paper, so it's substantially faster than vanilla Minecraft.
When we did a large scale real player test on a much earlier build of Folia we had ~327 players at peak and we did not generate chunks because we specifically wanted to see how it ran. We didn't max out at ~327, we just didn't have more joins than that.
The project improved a bunch already so that number without chunk generation is very doable to beat if you didn't pre-gen any chunks.
Generally it's free performance to pre-gen your world though. Highly recommended for regular players.
There's a bit of a distinction in the Minecraft world between "mods" and "plugins". Even though to the outside perspective they're the same thing, the terms are used for two different communities/ecosystems, basically.
"Plugins" are for bukkit-based compatible servers, like Spigot and Paper (and Folia, with some modifications).
"Mods" are more for forge, sponge, etc servers.
So you can kinda pick which direction you want to go. But the Paper project has a ton of API documentation and a few Github repos to even get you started writing your own plugins. The Discord server has a dev help channel with people happy to answer any questions.
The Sponge team has a similar setup as well if that's the route you'd like to go.
Microsoft has struct rules about the stuff you can sell for the server, and servers need to be EULA compliant. If they aren't they can get blacklisted or shutdown.
People do buy plugins but the vast majority of the plugins you'd want to use are free open source plugins. A lot of the paid/closed source stuff is kinda crappy or misleading anyway.
You can run a great server using free plugins and software. It might not be a money maker, but if your goal is to have people play and have fun and not buy stuff it's super easy and doable.
People do still donate to projects to support the authors who make the wheels spin.
Mineplex had the most concurrent players but they weren't on a single individual bare metal server or single server jar instance.
A lot of large "servers" like Mineplex, Hypixel, etc run a proxy which sits in front of a bunch of other servers. The concept of a "server" can have many meanings in Minecraft so it gets fuzzy quickly.
I'm not sure if this 1,000 person test is a record but I'm not aware of any other test running so many concurrent players on a single dedicated box with a single instance of Minecraft running. Folia takes advantage of more CPU threads so everyone is in sitting in the same server instance.
Ha, nice, thanks. I've never looked into this deeper than accepting the fact that it's doable. Now, if only I had the spare time to look into how did they shard the servers...
We tend to call those "networks", when they have a bunch of different gametypes and servers interconnected. At a smaller scale of a few hundred players it's pretty easily handled by off the shelf software like Velocity for the proxy and a few server instances running Paper.
You generally want good performing (not VPS or "cloud" instances) but you can run a bunch of different worlds and have people with cross server talk, the ability to warp between worlds, etc. Most of the larger networks and nearly all of the smaller networks use a variation of this kind of model.
* https://papermc.io/software/velocity - Newer, more performant, maintained by the team that makes Paper, one of the leading performance MC server implementations.
For context of scale btw, when Hypixel had 200k+ players online at peak we had something like 2,000+ 1U E3-1271v3's each with 32GB RAM, all colo'd in a single DC in Chicago. Egress is 70-80gbps or so 95th percentile, with most months (at high peak) egressing 10PB/mo+ of real-time, uncacheable data.
I used to play Minecraft as a child years ago, I also got into mod and plugin development as a kid.
I thoroughly enjoyed creating different game modes, similar to Hypixel. Whenever I would play on Hypixel I’d think about how the games had been implemented.
Seeing this thread brings back a lot of nostalgia. Reading through these comments makes me realise that a lot more work went into these servers than I had ever imagined. Naive me thinking it was just a bunch of spigot servers with bungeecord thrown on top.
I’d love to revisit and get back into it all. Alas, I’m stuck working on software nowadays instead.
That is 100 players per server = 12.5 players per hardware thread. The linked article got 31 players per available hardware thread, but was only able to saturate part of the CPU landing at about 70 players per used hardware thread. The TPS also dropped by a factor of 3. If you were running at 50% utilisation and maintained 20 TPS, then I don't see a significant increase in performance. I imagine I'm missing the point ;)
(Disclaimer: I'm on the Paper team, and Paper is the org under which Folia sits.)
Paper (and Folia) have differences from "vanilla" (official) Minecraft, which is part of how they improve performance to begin with.
So it is true that there are differences from vanilla. Most "in-game devices" - if you mean builds, redstone machines, mob farms, etc - have versions that people have found will work on Paper and Folia. They might require some tweaking but complex redstone and mob farms are definitely very doable.
The goal is to have a close-to-vanilla experience while fixing bugs, patching exploits, and improving performance to run more people on a given piece of server hardware.
The biggest issue with Folia right now is that it's very new so there aren't a lot of plugins that support it just yet. That's changing every day! And of course it still has some crashing issues because it's still in development. :)
(Disclaimer: I'm on the Paper team, and Paper is the org under which Folia sits)
AgentK20 explained the technical bits along with the other reply to you, but basically the "actually all in one world" is the big part. For sharding you're handing players off to different instances. With Folia someone can just walk from one person to another without any issue or lag.
Folia dynamically groups people into regions depending on their distance. So it was designed to have people spread out to be able to support many regions across many threads. You can put 1000 people in one spot, it just gets very unhappy and you're now not really taking advantage of the whole point of Folia.
It's not a solution for every server or person but it's definitely cool because it's another tool in the Minecraft tool box. And the API is very similar to Paper, whereas the sharded options start to get kinda tricky quickly.
Anecdotal counterpoint: I've worked with three sets of people who dated in the workplace, and when they broke up it was fire and brimstone. In all three instances, one of the two quit.
