Entity tick throttling

Stratum throttles server-side entity ticking by distance to the nearest player. The settings live under Performance.EntityTicking in the stratum-performance.json sidecar, and the feature is on by default. A Performance block in stratum.json is read only when no sidecar exists, and the next save moves it into the sidecar. This page explains what anchors the distance bands, what is exempt, and how to restore vanilla behavior. All values below are the shipped defaults.

Distance bands

Each entity ticks every Nth server tick based on the 3D distance to the nearest anchoring player:

Band edges are clamped so they never invert (near, then mid, then far), and the intervals so they never decrease with distance.

What anchors the bands

Distances are measured to every online player that has a player entity, whatever its connection state. The server creates that entity as soon as it admits the client, after authentication and any join queue, so a client anchors while it is still loading, well before it reaches the Playing state. The entity is usually placed and spawned at that moment. When placement is put off (spawn chunk not loaded yet, a random spawn radius for new players, or crowd spawn spreading), the client anchors from the position its entity held before placement until the server moves it to the spawn point. For a returning player that is where they logged out. This matters more than it looks:

• A client that is still connecting, authenticating or waiting in the join queue has no player entity yet and anchors nothing. Once admitted it anchors from its spawn position, even while it is still downloading assets or loading chunks.
• The measurement is per dimension: a player in another dimension does not anchor entities in this one.
• With no player entity online at all, the throttle steps aside and every entity ticks every tick, as in vanilla. With players online but none in the entity’s dimension, the entity ticks at the very-far interval. Entities never stop ticking entirely.

Exemptions

Checked per entity, in this order:

• Player entities are never throttled.
• ThrottleCreatures / ThrottleInanimate (both true): turn off throttling for a whole entity class.
• Moving entities (SkipMovingEntities, true): an entity whose motion exceeds MovingEntitySpeedThreshold (0.01 blocks per tick) is not throttled that tick. Note that even a dropped item keeps enough residual motion to stay exempt for a long time.
• Excluded mod domains (ExcludedModDomains, default ["vsvillage"]): entities from these asset domains are never throttled. They skip the creature budget below only when they reach this check. Three kinds of entity leave earlier without the exemption: a moving entity, any creature while ThrottleCreatures is false, and any entity while throttling is disabled or no player entity is online. A non-zero MaxCreatureTicksPerTick can therefore still defer an excluded creature, such as a walking villager. Custom AI and pathfinder mods can assume a near-constant tick frequency, and throttling them can corrupt their internal state (observed with VSVillage’s pathfinder: villagers froze at town edges under an earlier version of this system).

Ambient fauna tier

On top of the band interval, entities whose code matches AmbientFaunaCodePrefixes (by default fish, butterflies, dragonflies, bees, rats, chickens, hens, roosters, pigs and sheep) get an extra stride multiplier (AmbientFaunaTickMultiplier, default 2): background mood does not need full-rate AI even near a player. Disable with AmbientFaunaTierEnabled: false.

Creature budget

MaxCreatureTicksPerTick (default 0, meaning unlimited) hard-caps creature ticks per server tick with round-robin fairness. It is opt-in, and it has no effect when region ticking is on (Performance.RegionTicking.Enabled, off by default): the region-parallel path never applies the budget, although creatures there are still distance-throttled. /stratum regions warns when this combination is configured.

Restoring vanilla behavior

Performance.EntityTicking.Enabled: false turns off the distance bands, the ambient tier and the exemptions: every loaded entity then gets its game tick once per entity-simulation tick, as in vanilla, as long as MaxCreatureTicksPerTick stays 0 and HardDespawnEnabled stays false (both apply whatever Enabled says). The physics activation range (Performance.Physics.ActivationRangeEnabled) is a separate throttle and is not affected.

Notes for test authors

The details below are for people writing automated scenarios or load tests. Server operators can skip this section.

• Your test client anchors as soon as the server admits it, from wherever it spawned, even if it never gets past Connected. With no player entity online at all, the throttle is bypassed and every entity ticks at full rate, so a far probe shows no throttling at all.
• Keep probe entities motionless or SkipMovingEntities will exempt them from the very throttle you are measuring. A straw dummy stands perfectly still; a dropped item does not.
• Derive geometry from the player’s actual position, read after any teleport settles: joins scatter players around the spawn point, which can silently move a probe across a band boundary.
• Assert exact counts, not rates: an unthrottled entity ticks exactly once per entity-simulation tick, a very-far entity exactly 1 in 10 (up to stride phase at the window edges). With the toggle off, both must equal the simulation tick count exactly.
• Same dimension only: a probe in another dimension than every player measures the very-far interval, not the band you placed a player in.