I hadn’t even planned to start using them until we started running into Netty Handler issues and lag on levels I hadn’t seen when hosting on my PC. However with that said, we also had more family members playing on the server. My sister and her husband had started playing along side their daughter.

So I started looking into ways to address this while staying a vanilla server. I began with researching what exactly causes lag in the first place. I visited many websites, but I think this webpage explains it best.

Eventually I opened a ticket and asked the CreeperHost staff what options I had for addressing this. They suggested Bukkit Beta, but it wasn’t on their supported list so I chose the Bukkit .jar that was on the supported list…. Doing so ate about half of my custom villagers and cloned the rest. No idea why a 1.6.4 .jar would do that to a 1.7.x map but it did. It also ate over half of my sister’s estate and messed up every flower pot for everyone. So of course I opened a ticket and asked about that. That’s when it was brought to my attention that the Bukkit version I had installed was for Minecraft 1.6.4 and not for Minecraft 1.7.x.

To make matters even better, the last back up file I had was from 3 days before, which meant my sister would have lost more from a roll back than the losses caused by my mistake. So, I rebuilt her place while in creative mode the best I could. I took the Bukkit .jar for 1.6.4 out and put in the Bukkit .jar for 1.7.2 (Bukkit Beta).

Needless to say not only did life have to slap me in the face with “pay attention to what people are saying” yet again, but this experience really drove home the importance of backing up the server files before making any major changes or updates.

It could have been worse. My sister could have lynched me and the CreeperHost staff could have called me as stupid as I had felt. But none of that happened, for which I am deeply grateful.

Originally published on LiveJournal. Archived here on 09/13/2019.