Tick Rate Manager

The tick rate manager in Vanilla Minecraft allows the server to modify the tick “state” of the server. This allows multiple operations like sprinting, freezing, modifying the tick rate, etc. With Folia, this API still does exist, however it doesn’t entirely work properly, and is discouraged to utilize in Folia because it doesn’t work properly.

The tick rate manager allows modifying numerous states of the server and how it ticks, like:

• Modification of the tick rate. Minecraft processes ticks at 20 TPS(ticks per second), or 50 milliseconds per tick. With the tick rate manager, you can modify this rate to be faster or slower, thus making the server run faster or slower.
• Tick “sprinting”. Sprinting is basically where the server sets a target amount of ticks to run as fast as it can, ignoring the tick rate.
• Tick “freezing” and “unfreezing”. This doesn’t mean the server stops ticking entirely, it means that it stops running game elements like random ticking, entities, chunk ticking, etc. When you “unfreeze” the server, it resumes running game elements.

Caution

Never use the Bukkit API version of the tick rate manager API with Canvas, as it will throw an UnsupportedOperationException, as you shouldn’t be using this with Folia or its forks.

What Canvas’ Implementation Does

Canvas’ implementation is actually quite similar, but is split up between a server-wide state, and individual schedule handle state. The tick rate for example is a server-wide state, where the tick rate is the same for all schedule handles in Folia’s scheduler. Meanwhile, sprinting and freezing are specific to individual schedule handles. If the server-wide or handle-specific tick state is changed, the server will broadcast the new state for all players.

Internally, these updates are always scheduled, no matter what, to the processing queue in each state. Before the next tick even starts for the schedule handle, it will process these updates to ensure a consistent time that the state will be updated. The tick rate can be set on any thread and will affect all schedule handles immediately after setting.

Canvas provides an alternative API to the tick rate manager, called the RegionThreadingTickManager, which allows modification of these states. This can be fetched with Bukkit#getRegionThreadingTickRateManager

Note

Canvas adds a walk action, which just informs the schedule handle to stop sprinting, regardless of if it reached its target or not

With this, you can modify the tick rate, or fetch the region handle at a specified chunk to modify the state of that region. Do note, when fetching if the region is sprinting or running game elements, the call must be executed on the runner owning that schedule handle, otherwise it will throw an IllegalStateException. All other actions to modify the state are scheduled to the process queue, regardless of if the current runner owns the schedule handle or not.