The more complex the terrain, the more resources used?

Been curious about this for a while. Servers nowadays seem... so boring and predictable with their environment. Yeah, Minecraft's default terrain is "okay", but I miss the days of epic seeds. Impressive overhangs, wondrous forests, crazy waterfalls and underground caverns... I just don't see it anymore. I love that aspect and I truly miss it, but I have this feeling that it may be for good reason.

I'm personally waiting for a plugin called TerrainControl to update, which will allow me to adjust the volatility of the terrain naturally formed and other things, but I'm wondering if I make my terrain too crazy, would I see a rather large jump in usage of my CPU and/or RAM?

Does anyone have experience in this subject? The difference between my world being good ol' generic Minecraft, and my world being some floating islands, crazy mountains, underground lakes and rivers.

Would this make my world by default rape the resources? What do you think about all this?

 

Depends on what blocks you put. Like if you put a lot of falling Water or Lava, you will most likely crash. Other blocks like grass or dirt should not affect you more than air.

 

Adjusting the way everything is setup may have roughly twice the falling water/lava naturally present than usual. I wouldn't imagine this would be... TOO big of a deal though, would it? I'm not exactly looking to make some kind of Nether equivalent, but with water and in the overworld.

About the generic blocks vs. air, I kind of figured this, but for some reason I want to think the map having a lot of crazy terrain would have an impact. If not, this is great news, and I suppose the only way to know would be to test myself, but... I'm at a stance where "surely, someone knows what's up with this".

I've not personally experienced any huge setbacks, but then the last time I messed with this kind of stuff was hMod.

 

Obviously, it has a small impact, a solid blocks has 6 quads rendered ( if exposed on all sides, if it's covered, I hope they remove them from rendering ). But I think that it's mostly stuff that is affected by redstone and liquids will mostly slow down the server. Still, I don't think it's that big of a problem.

 

You should be fine. Usually water and lava only lag when they flow. Once they're finished flowing and all in place (no more calculations), you're all good. So the most lag will happen when the world is first generated, and all the water and lava is flowing into position.