Ember Horizon | Dynamic Chunk Control

Ember Horizon 3.0 is a ground-up rework of HydroLiteChunks. Same plugin, rebuilt under the Ember line, with a completely different approach to keeping chunk load in hand. Your bStats history carries over (same registration), so nothing resets. Why the rework The old plugin looped over loaded chunks and called unloadChunk on the far ones. On any modern server that is mostly a no-op: Paper's own ticket system already unloads what nothing wants, and anything still needed reloads moments later. It bought churn and reported it as a saving. We measured it: 3,600 force-loaded empty chunks moved TPS by almost nothing. Empty chunks are close to free. What costs a server is how many chunks are ticked, and what is standing in them. New: adaptive view and simulation distance · Every cycle it compares TPS to a low and a high threshold. Below the low it steps distances down, above the high it eases them back up. One step per cycle, so the horizon drifts a chunk at a time instead of snapping. · Simulation distance drops first and is restored last. Ticking a chunk costs far more than sending one, and players notice the view close in long before distant mobs pause. · Per-rank floors: emberhorizon.view.<n> and emberhorizon.simulation.<n> so paying players are squeezed last. Highest node wins, still capped by your maximum. New: diagnostics that show where the time went · /horizon hotspots lists the heaviest loaded chunks with block coordinates. Tile entities count double, because a hopper ticks every tick whether or not anyone is near. · /horizon tickets shows every plugin holding chunk tickets and every force-loaded chunk. Force-loads live in level.dat and outlast restarts forever, and are the usual answer to "why is this server eating memory". · /horizon sweep clears force-loads, dry run first. · /horizon status and /horizon players show the current distances, why they last changed, and what each player actually has. Compatibility · One jar covers 1.16.5 to 26.2 on Paper, Purpur and Spigot, Java 8+. · Version-specific API goes through a reflection layer: simulation distance is used on 1.18+, per-player view distance on Paper, with an honest per-world fallback elsewhere. It reports what it can and cannot do on your server rather than pretending. Fixes · Entity counts were blind to entities in unloaded entity sections (a 1.17+ storage change), so a busy chunk could read as empty. Now counted correctly. · /horizon reload no longer leaves the scheduler driving a discarded manager. Notes Optional bStats and an optional startup update check, each off with one config line. Nothing about your server is sent, and it never downloads or installs anything.