Skip to content

How it works

The deep version, for people who want to know exactly what EmberMC does to a tick before they run it on their server. Every page here covers one system: what Paper already does, the specific gap EmberMC fills, how the change behaves, what it costs, and how it was measured. Nothing is hand-waved, and where Paper already solves a problem we say so instead of taking credit for it.

A rule that runs through all of it: EmberMC does not reinvent what upstream already does well. Chunk loading, item and XP merging, decompression limits, teleport preloading and collision bounds are Paper's, and they are good, so we left them alone and built where there was a real gap. Six features that a lesser fork would have claimed as its own are documented here as "already Paper's, not reinvented", on purpose.

Performance

  • Entity tiers - the middle gear between Paper's on and off activation. Measured up to 82% lower entity tick time under 8,000 mobs.
  • Pathfinding backoff - stop mobs re-running A* against a target they have already proven they cannot reach.
  • Adaptive engine - watch the tick and ease off automatically under load, within bounded limits, then walk back.
  • Chunk engine - Paper's chunk system plus retention visibility: see which plugin is holding chunks loaded.
  • Idle memory trim - hand idle heap back to the OS while the server is empty.
  • Network visibility - a time-boxed sample of outbound traffic by category, zero cost when off.

Protection

  • Packet Guard - per-category inbound packet limits on top of Paper's all-packets limiter.
  • Item limits - a live per-chunk item cap against dupe floods and runaway farms.
  • XP-orb limits - a per-chunk orb cap that folds overflow into survivors and loses no experience.

Tools

  • The Doctor - reads every EmberMC number at once and tells you what is costing you and what to change.
  • Benchmark harness - /ember bench reproduces the tier numbers on your own load, so you never have to trust ours.

The short version

If you read one page, read entity tiers: it is the biggest win, it is measured, and /ember bench lets you reproduce the number on your own server in about a minute. Everything else is either a bounded protection you turn on when you need it, or a diagnostic that costs nothing until you ask it a question.