Description
Keep your farms and furnaces running and working, even when you're not around! Craft a powerful but dangerous Force Lode anchor (see screenshot for recipe hint), and power it with optical pulses, to keep mapblock(s) around it always loaded and active in the world. Particle effects show you exactly what areas are covered. Anchors that receive more/faster oscillating optical signals will maintain larger loaded volumes.
The maximum total number of affected mapblocks can be adjusted via settings, as well as the maximum per-anchor level and difficulty, and how long a player "visit" will keep a forcelode active for; see settingtypes.txt for more details. All settings can be adjusted at runtime, though block load limits may take up to a minute to take effect.
Areas will remain force-loaded as long as they are visited by any player at least once every so often (default 1 week, configurable). A player must be physically touching the volume loaded by a forcelode anchor to count as a visit. Areas that have not been visited for long enough are considered "abandoned" and will stop being force-loaded, until they are visited again.
If the number of mapblocks covered by forcelodes exceeds the configured limit, then some blocks will be randomly chosen to allow to be unloaded, weighted based on how close the blocks are to an anchor and the level of "power" they are receiving from the anchor. The set of loaded blocks will be rotated periodically so that lower-priority blocks will still likely spend some time loaded.
