Performance

Performance

NeroAgriculture is designed to stay cheap even at colony scale. The core rule is that nothing scans the whole world, a whole structure, or a whole work area every tick.

How work is bounded

• Crops grow on vanilla random ticks and store their identity/genetics in a non-ticking block entity — there is no crop registry and no world scan.
• Area machines (Planter, Harvester, Fertiliser Applicator) process a capped number of columns per pass from a rolling cursor, on an interval, phase-offset so neighbours do not all fire on the same tick, and skip unloaded columns.
• Greenhouses flood-fill their interior only on a slow safety interval or a structural change, cache the result, and publish it to an O(1) lookup index that crops query.
• Crop towers farm virtual slots (not thousands of blocks), a bounded number per pass, and cache their formed structure.
• Seasonal cycles cache the active modifier on coarse time buckets and compute the phase with a couple of arithmetic operations.
• Terraforming advances by a config-capped amount per tick and mutates no blocks at all.

Tuning for big servers

If you run very large farms, the pacing keys let you trade throughput for tick budget: automation.columns_per_pass, automation.interval_ticks, crop_tower.slots_per_pass, greenhouse.revalidate_ticks, and terraforming.progress_per_tick. Lower per-pass counts and longer intervals reduce per-tick cost.

Rendering

Server logic never depends on renderer state, so client-side visual quality can be reduced without affecting farms. (Rich crop-layer renderers and animation-quality controls are a client-focused follow-up.)

See also: Automation, Crop Towers, Configuration.