> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://dedicatedmc.io/blog/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # World management: pre-generation, borders and resource worlds - URL: https://dedicatedmc.io/blog/world-management-and-pregen/ - Published: 2026-09-03T10:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-30T12:21:18.000Z - Description: How pre-generation, world borders, a resource world and random teleport keep fresh terrain from taxing your Minecraft server and stealing the tick. - Author: Mark E - Tags: Guide, Minecraft, Performance, Server Admin Generating a new chunk is one of the most expensive things a Minecraft server ever does. When a player sprints into terrain nobody has visited, the server has to build that ground from scratch, decorate it, and hand it back, all inside the same tick budget it is using to keep everyone else's world running. Do that for one player and it is a blip. Do it for ten players riding elytra in ten directions and the tick budget vanishes, and everyone feels the stutter even though only a few people are actually exploring. World management is the set of decisions that stops fresh terrain from taxing the people standing still. This post covers pre-generation, world borders, a separate resource world, the nether roof and height, and spreading players out on join. If you want the wider context first, this sits inside the full chain in [running a Minecraft SMP](https://dedicatedmc.io/blog/running-a-minecraft-smp), and world generation is one of the usual suspects in the [Minecraft lag checklist](https://dedicatedmc.io/blog/minecraft-lag-checklist). ## Pre-generation, and why it protects the tick Pre-generation means building the chunks ahead of time, while the server is quiet, so that live play reads terrain from disk instead of generating it on the fly. The cost of generation does not go away. You just move it to a moment when nobody is online to feel it. A pre-generated world still loads chunks as players move, but loading a chunk that already exists is far cheaper than inventing one, so exploration stops competing with the tick. The standard tool for this is Chunky, a plugin that walks the world outward from spawn and generates every chunk inside a radius you set. You run it once when you set the world up, let it grind through the area you expect players to reach, and from then on that ground is on disk. The commands are short. Set the shape with `/chunky shape square`, set how far out to go with `/chunky radius ` (the radius is measured in blocks from the centre), then start the run with `/chunky start`. You can stop it at any point with `/chunky pause` and pick it back up later with `/chunky continue`, which is handy when you want the work to run only overnight. If you have already set a world border, `/chunky worldborder` snaps the generation area to match it, so the two line up exactly. Pre-generation is heavy while it runs, because you are deliberately doing all that expensive work in one stretch. Do it before you open the server to players, or during a quiet window, and throttle it if the box is also serving a live world. The point is to spend the cost on your terms rather than have it land mid-session. ## A world border to bound the map A pre-generation run needs an edge, otherwise it never finishes, because the world is effectively infinite. A world border gives it one. Set the border first, then pre-generate out to it, and the two line up: the ground players can reach is the ground you have already built. The border also caps a problem that grows quietly over time. Every chunk a player visits is written to disk and has to be considered when it is loaded, so an unbounded world sprawls into gigabytes of terrain that somebody generated once and never returned to. A sensible border keeps the map to a size you can pre-generate, back up, and reason about. Pick a radius that suits your player count and playstyle, tell players what it is, and pre-generate to match. For most servers the vanilla border is all you need, and it is one command: `/worldborder set ` sets the width in blocks, measured across the whole border rather than as a radius, and `/worldborder center ` places its middle. It costs nothing, the server always enforces it, and Chunky can read it directly. A plugin-managed border (WorldBorder is the usual one) is worth reaching for only when you need per-world borders at different sizes or a round shape, since the vanilla border is always square. As a starting point, a diameter of around 10000 blocks, so 5000 out from spawn in each direction, suits a small to mid-sized SMP: scale it up for a bigger playerbase, or tighten it if you want a more social, closer-knit map. ## A separate resource world that resets The main world is where players build, and you want it to stay stable and worth protecting. Mining, tree farming and general strip-hunting for resources chew through terrain and leave the map pocked with holes. A resource world, sometimes called a mining world, is a second world dedicated to that gathering, kept separate from the world people live in. The reason it earns its keep is that you can reset it on a schedule. Every week or month, depending on your server, the resource world regenerates fresh, ores come back, and the damage players did to it simply disappears. That spares the main world from being strip-mined bare, keeps resources flowing without inflating your backups with churned terrain, and means the only world you have to preserve carefully is the one that holds people's builds. Give the resource world its own border too, so its resets stay bounded and quick. ## The nether roof and height considerations The nether has a quirk worth a decision: the bedrock ceiling at the top of the dimension has a flat, open layer above it that players can reach and use as a fast, mob-free highway. Some servers welcome that as convenient long-distance travel. Others block access to keep play inside the intended space. There is no single right answer, but it is better to choose deliberately than to discover players living on the roof later. If you decide to block it, the cleanest method is a small plugin that watches for anyone above the bedrock ceiling and teleports them back below it. NetherRoofBlocker is a lightweight, purpose-built option that does exactly that, catching players at or above the roof and dropping them to a safe spot underneath. If you would rather allow it, leave it be, but make that a choice rather than an oversight. Do not try to seal the roof by placing blocks by hand: players reach it with ender pearls through the bedrock, and they will find any gap you leave. Height matters more broadly because world height is part of what every chunk carries. Taller worlds mean more blocks per chunk to store, load and light, so the world height and any build-limit changes feed back into generation and memory cost. For most SMPs the defaults are fine, but if you extend height you are paying for it on every chunk. ## Spreading players out with random teleport When everyone spawns and starts building in the same place, you get a dense cluster of loaded chunks, entities and redstone all sitting on top of each other, which concentrates load exactly where the most people are. A random teleport feature, usually a `/rtp` or `/wild` command, drops a player at a random point inside the border instead, so bases spread across the map rather than piling up around spawn. That spread is good for the tick. Loaded chunks and their entities are distributed instead of stacked, so no single region carries the whole server's simulation cost. Bound the random teleport to the world border and to already pre-generated ground where you can, so a player using it lands on terrain that exists rather than triggering a fresh, expensive generation the moment they arrive. Several plugins handle this well. EzRTP is a well-maintained, highly configurable option that integrates directly with Chunky, so it works hand in hand with your pre-generation and stays inside the border. ## Putting it together The through-line is the same one that runs under everything else on a server: protect the tick. Pre-generation moves the cost of new terrain off live play, a world border makes that job finite and keeps the map a size you can manage, a resettable resource world spares the world people care about, and random teleport spreads load instead of concentrating it. None of it is complicated, and all of it pays back the first busy evening when ten people go exploring and nobody notices. If you would rather run all this on hardware built for the tick in the first place, our [Minecraft hosting](https://dedicatedmc.io/minecraft-server-hosting?ref=dedicatedmc.io) gives you the reserved cores and fast NVMe that make pre-generation quick and chunk loads cheap.