ColorGens

The brief

ColorGens is a gens server that went viral on TikTok faster than its setup could handle. When they called us in, 1,200 players were split over three realms, and each realm was running at 4–7 TPS.

A Minecraft server is meant to run at 20 ticks per second. At 4–7, everything happens at a quarter to a third of normal speed: gens pay out slowly, blocks lag back, and new players from the videos leave again.

Season 1: replacing Skript

The biggest systems on the server were written in Skript, and they were what was eating the tick. We replaced them with custom code.

That alone made a big difference: most of the time the realms held 18–20 TPS. But it was still three realms with lag spikes, because the base the server ran on couldn't hold everyone in one place.

Season 2: a custom core on our own CanvasMC fork

For season 2 we custom coded the whole core. It runs on our own fork of CanvasMC, with the optimizations this gamemode needs built into the server software itself.

Now there's nothing on the server we can't change, so when something costs tick time, we fix it at the source.

Jarvis: catching dupers in the logs

Big launches attract dupers and bug abusers. We built Jarvis, our own dupe detection system, for this. It scans all the server logs and flags dupers and bug abusers, so staff can act on evidence instead of reports.

The result

Season 2 runs on one instance with 2,300+ players so far. In season 1, 1,200 players needed three realms and still had lag spikes.

Timeline