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Troubleshooting

denfry edited this page Jul 30, 2026 · 1 revision

Troubleshooting

Check here and the FAQ before opening an issue — see reporting a problem below for what to include if you do.

The plugin refuses to enable

[TerraForge] Invalid configuration: infrastructure.* must all be false ...
[TerraForge] Fix plugins/TerraForge/terraforge.yml and restart.

TerraForge fails fast rather than generating a world that is wrong in a way you cannot undo. The message names the exact key. Common causes:

Message contains Fix
infrastructure.* must all be false set every infrastructure key to false
sea-level must lie between min-y < sea-level < max-y
blocks-per-km must be greater than 0 use 0.5, 1.0, 2.0 or 5.0
Unknown projection use equirectangular, web_mercator or plate_carree

The world is flat / all ocean

The DEM is not being found. Check:

  1. plugins/TerraForge/data/dem/ contains .tfdem files (not .tif).
  2. The tiles cover your play area — file names encode their south-west corner, e.g. N50E008.
  3. The log for Missing DEM tile.

.tif files are not read at runtime; run terraforge prepare-dem first — see DEM Pipeline.

Missing DEM tile warnings

[TerraForge-Generator] Missing DEM tile: N52E013 (no prepared file)
[TerraForge-Generator] Falling back to terrain.fallback-elevation (0.0 m)

Not fatal — that area becomes flat land at the fallback elevation. Prepare the missing tiles and regenerate the affected chunks (already-generated chunks are not rewritten).

Mountains are flat on top

Elevation exceeded max-y and was soft-clamped. Either raise terrain.max-y, or raise terrain.meters-per-block so more real metres fit into one block. See Projections and Scale.

Terrain looks smooth and featureless

At blocks-per-km: 1.0 one block spans ~33 DEM samples, so the DEM is heavily downsampled. Raise blocks-per-km, or raise terrain.vertical-exaggeration to make the remaining relief more visible.

/earth whereami says "unknown country"

terraforge.db has no boundary data for that point, or the file is missing. Run terraforge prepare-geo. The plugin works without it — only the geographic lookups are unavailable.

Towny or BlueMap shows NOT INSTALLED

Expected when the plugin is absent. If it is installed:

  1. Check the plugin name matches exactly (Towny, BlueMap).
  2. Check towny.enabled / bluemap.enabled in terraforge.yml.
  3. Check the other plugin actually enabled — TerraForge detects it at its own enable time.

Chunk generation is slow

  1. /earth cache stats — a hit rate below ~90% means the tile cache is too small; raise cache.dem-tile-cache-entries.
  2. Check memory pressure in the same output; if it is over 1.0, caches are thrashing.
  3. Pregenerate the play area — see Pregeneration.
  4. Profile before changing anything else — see Performance.

Server runs out of memory

DEM tiles are memory-mapped, so they consume address space rather than heap, but the caches around them are real. Lower cache.memory-limit-mb and cache.dem-tile-cache-entries, or give the JVM more headroom.

New chunks do not line up with old ones

scale, earth.origin, projection or terrain.* was changed after the world was generated. Those values are baked into existing chunks. Either revert the change or regenerate the world; there is no migration.

Reporting a problem

Still stuck? Open a bug report and include:

  • TerraForge version, Paper version, Java version
  • terraforge.yml (remove nothing but secrets — there shouldn't be any)
  • the startup banner
  • the log lines around the failure
  • for terrain problems, the output of /earth whereami at the affected spot

General questions that aren't a bug go in Discussions instead.


See also: FAQ · Configuration

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