Spawns, pathing and our first long test session

Last Friday we ran our first long test session: eight hours on a single machine, eight players, no restarts. This entry is what held up, what fell over, and what we are rewriting before the next one.

What held up

The world kept ticking for the whole session. Spawn tables loaded once at startup and stayed resident, and every region we walked had active patrols from the first minute.

• Spawn tables loaded once and stayed resident for the whole session.
• Patrols held their formation across region borders.
• The server tick stayed flat with all eight players in one region.

What fell over

Two things broke, both in the same place: handing a patrol across a region border. The pathing grid rebuilds when a patrol crosses, and under load the rebuild stalled the tick long enough for everyone to see it.

Eight hours in, the world was still ticking. The pathing was not.

1. Move the grid rebuild off the tick thread.
2. Cache the border transition instead of rebuilding it.
3. Add a timeout and a fallback path when a rebuild stalls.

What we are rewriting before the next one

The border handoff is the first rewrite. The fix follows the same rule as everything else we ship: nothing lands until a volunteer has run it for a full session, the same way the vetted server list checks community servers.

The next session is scheduled once the rewrite lands. Notes from it will follow in the next entry, and the raw log is on the Discord.