The Shipyard

Worked Examples

What blocks and chunks does the chunk claim contain?

A chunk claim of contains all the chunks from to , which in turn contain all the blocks from to , where and are the minimum and maximum y coordinates of the dimension the chunk claim is in.

What is the maximum number of blocks in a chunk claim?

The maximum amount of blocks inside a ship, assuming the default dimension height of 384, is

Custom Entities

Mods like Archimedes' Ships and its successors (DaVinci's Vessels, Plato's Transporters, etc.) use custom entities to represent ships, and store each ship's blocks using NBT tags stored with the entity.

The Create mod also uses custom entities to represent its contraptions.

Pros:

• Simplicity: Custom entities typically don't require much code and are easy to port to newer versions.

Cons:

• Not functional: Blocks on ships can't be used or ticked, so one can't craft, sleep, use chests, doors, redstone, vegetable farms, mob farms, etc. on ships - most of the things one expects to do while playing Minecraft.

• Incompatible: Not even vanilla blocks are functional on ships, so modded blocks don't stand a chance.

• Bad performance: Minecraft entities have notoriously bad performance. Furthermore, these mods are generally forced to reimplement Minecraft chunk rendering, often with worse performance than vanilla and especially worse than optimization mods like Sodium.

Separate Dimensions

Immersive Portals is the only mod that can project chunks from one dimension to another.

Dimension

A Minecraft dimension, like the Overworld or Nether, represented by a Level object.

True position

The position of a block as it appears to the player, rather than its position in the shipyard. In the rest of our documentation, we refer to this as the "world" or "world space" position.

True dimension

The dimension of a block as it appears to the player, rather than the dimension of its shipyard.

Pros:

• Powerful and flexible: Ships can have unlimited size, because they don't have to share a shipyard, and ships automatically work cross-dimensionally. Blocks function perfectly on ships, as long as the game is modified to be aware of their true dimension and their true position.

Cons:

• Complicated and incompatible: A substantial amount of Minecraft code and other mods expect blocks to be situated in the same dimension as the entities and other blocks that they interact with. The Minecraft client also expects there to be only a single dimension loaded at all times. This means that Immersive Portals has a huge amount of invasive mixins, and is subsequently incompatible with many other mods and difficult to update. Furthermore, mixins that patch the game to be aware of block's true dimensions can be complex and difficult to write.

• Bad performance: Loading multiple dimensions (which involves loading chunks, in addition to other things required for each dimension) has more overhead than only loading chunks.

Shipyard

Valkyrien Skies uses a shipyard to store ships. Each ship has a chunk claim in the shipyard, and each ship stores its blocks in "ship chunks" inside the chunk claim, in the same dimension as the ship.

Pros:

• Powerful and flexible (relatively): Ships can be as large as the plots. Blocks function perfectly on ships, as long as they are aware of their true position.

• Compatible (relatively): Blocks may work incorrectly if the game is unaware of their true position, but patches to change position are generally much easier to write and maintain than patches to change position and dimension.

• Good performance: The overhead of ships is the same as the overhead of loading more chunks. Ships can benefit from existing performance mods like Lithium and Sodium.

Cons:

• Ships have a maximum size: Ships can't become larger than their plots.