Consequences of moving/renaming .mca files.

I'd like to be able to copy sections of a map from one place or another (without worldedit) or to a completely world.

On a test server, while it was off, I found that I could move .mca files, essentially overwriting an existing .mca file with an .mca file that I want to replace it with.

Started up bukkit, it threw a bunch of errors like:
Chunk file at -23,17 is in the wrong location; relocating. (Expected -23, 17, got 9, 17)
Wrong location for EntityPig['Pig'/3535, l='test3', x=510.50, y=64.00, z=219.50] in world 'test3'!

But it calmed down after awhile, and it looks like it basically worked. I just don't know what the long term problems could be of doing this.

Is this not a good solution to my problem?

Trying to copy an entire 512x512x256 size area with worldedit just doesn't work. Well, it works, but lags out the server for 1/2 an hour.

 

You are asking for trouble by moving these files. If you copy an entire folder, you are sometimes safe, but picking and choosing, or even renaming any of these files really confuses the hell out of your server.

Your best bet to avoid the worldedit lag is to download a recent copy of MCedit and use that to manipulate your maps.

Personally I just warn my users that it's about to crunch for a while, or I do my world edit stuff late at night when nobody is on. I sometimes get a good laugh when I copy and paste large areas.

As for it taking a half hour... is your hard drive going absolutely crazy when this is happening?

 

I think the bottleneck is mostly with CPU. It may not take a half hour, I was geusstimating.
Fortunately or unfortunately, there is never a time on my server when no one is on.

 

Even a top of the line computer will lag out for a bit if you try to move that many blocks in one action. Have you tried breaking it up? I usually try to keep my worldedit commands smaller. Even if that means moving 10 smaller areas instead of one big one.

Basically that is your only option without causing lag or requiring downtime.

That's almost 70 million blocks! 70 MILLION!!!!

EDIT... that is definitely over 9000.

 

Yeah, I know all the tricks with worldedit, including copy and pasting smaller parts. On my server I can change about 1,500,000 blocks without anyone noticing. Even if I chop this into 4 parts, I'm still looking at over 15,000,000 blocks. It's either going to require a lot of work with worldedit, or its going to lag the server a lot.

My server is broken up into plots, which players buy. They're currently 400x400. When I generate a new world, players like to get their stuff moved into the new world, especially since the old world goes away. Potentially I have well over 100 plots to copy. This is a lot of work for my admins to copy and paste. The only time I generally do a new map is when biomes get added to minecraft.

Going forward, what I'd like to do is make the plots 512x512 and align them to the region .mca file boundaries. Then when a new world is generated, all I need is two pieces of information, 1) what .mca file needs to be moved, 2) what file do I need to overwrite it with. That's easy information to get. Then I take the server down, and move the .mca files en-mass.

I just need to know, from someone who knows the anvil file format well, is this ok?

 

It will "work" but it's risky, as I stated. You will get entity errors, for both entities and the block entities... some of which will go away like the ones you already had. However, some of them will become a persistant glitch spitting out error messages.

The good news... there are tools like chunkster that will basically patch things up for you if things DO go sour for you.

Instead of moving whole chunks to a new map, why not just keep the old maps active as well and link them to your new map with some portals?