Differences vs. vanilla Minecraft Server

Bravo was written from the ground up and doesn’t inherit code from any other Minecraft project. This means that it sometimes behaves very differently, in subtle and obvious ways, from other servers.

The “Notchian” server is the server authored by Notch and distributed by Mojang as a companion to the Mojang-sponsored client.

Responsiveness

Bravo is occasionally perceived to be “lighter” or “snappier” compared to the Notchian server. Reports of feeling like players are moving faster than normal are also common. The root cause is simple: Bravo is quicker to respond to clients than the Notchian server. This is normal, expected, and not currently planned to be fixed.

Chunks

The Notchian server maintains a floating pattern above players, centered on the chunk the player is standing in. This pattern is always a square of chunks, 21 chunks to a side. This results in a total of 441 chunks being deployed to the client at any one time. All 441 chunks are deployed before the client is permitted to interact with the world.

Bravo does something slightly different; while Bravo also has a floating pattern above each of its players, the pattern is a circle with the same diameter as the Notchian server’s square. This effectively results in a circle of 315 chunks deployed to the client; a savings of nearly 30% in memory and bandwidth for chunks. Additionally, only the 50 closest chunks are deployed before the client is spawned and permitted to interact with the world.

Inventory

The Notchian viewpoint of items in the inventory is as a list of slots. Each slot holds an item, identified by a single number, and can hold 1 to 64 instances of that item. Some items can be damaged. Some items are completely different depending on their damage.

Bravo views item identifiers as a composite key of a primary and secondary identifier. In this scheme, items with identical primary keys and different secondary keys are properly segregated, and item damage is stored as the secondary key, keeping items with differing amounts of damage from occupying the same slot. This avoids an entire class of bugs, where items can be stacked and unstacked to change the amount of damage on them, which have historically plagued the Notchian codebase.

Minecarts

Bravo permits minecart tracks to be placed on glass.