Minecraft servers

2022-11-02

Minecraft offers thousands of servers, each with different popularity levels. You can even rent private servers called Realms to your family and friends. As with any major multiplayer online (MMO) game, reliability and performance suffer when there are more players. You may see reduced framerates and increased latency in the starting areas of games such as World of Warcraft and Destiny 2. Hadean's Aether Engine aims to address this issue with its unique take on server technology.

Mojang Studios created a server that could support over 1,024 players reliably using the AetherEngine in three days. This was even without any previous experience or knowledge of how to optimize it. The Aether Engine is unique in that it can dynamically scale up or down to meet larger loads, and free up resources for smaller loads. Because the Aether Engine can scale to exactly allocate what each area requires, it allows for isolated areas to be run in online games as well as more populated ones.

This means that new games, which can't predict how popular they will become (Fall Guys being a recent example), won't be affected by not having the resources to support them. This could lead to slow load times, misconnections, and long load times. These surges can be handled by the Aether Engine in real-time, so it shouldn't matter how many players are playing.

Although the Aether Engine is used in many different ways than video games, it also has many other uses. Mojang Studios being able to test the engine allows Hadean to gather the data needed to improve the engine for other scenarios and get the product to market. The future could bring us more MMOs and intricate Minecraft servers.