This was about 2 years ago.... Or whenever the latest MC version was still 1.8.8 and me and my friends made a server, to.. you know... Just enjoy time together... So this one Sunday it was just me and one of my friends online and we decided to both go mine in the tunnel we just dug out. We went together to mine and after a fairly long mining session, we decide to return home only to find the entire village (near where we settled) and all the grass, crops, houses on fire. And I'm not talking only wood. I'm talking cobblestone, grass, wood (obviously) ,quartz, etc. You name it. ALL ON FIRE. This fire had a radius of about 70 to 100 blocks around the village. Only me and my friend were online, nobody else was, we were both next to each other when we descended into the mine and ascended too. Nobody else joined, no fire was present prior to that. Nobody had a chimney and there was no blacksmith in the village (if there was the lava might have caused part of it to go on fire) This mystery of mine still remains unsolved after years of thinking back to it... So I was wondering if anybody would have any ideas on how this all took place. Yes, I'm sure I wasnt daydreaming, and plus there would be no point for me to make this up. I looked this up multiple times online but never got results that matched what i experienced. I'm sure I have screenshots of this somewhere, and I will post them here, when I go on a scavenger hunt through my Minecraft screenshots. If anybody knows anything or can suggest something, you're than welcome to reply to this. โ๏ธ
Umm, probably a lightning strike (or several) occurred. You apparently have the doFireTick gamerule turned off, which makes it so that any fires that get started will last forever instead of consuming flammable blocks (it's a common setting for server play so if you didn't set this yourself maybe the server was preconfigured for it). It sounds like fire spreading (which I think is a separate gamerule?) was still on, allowing it to eventually cover a large area.
The alternatives are:
1)you're playing modded and have some sort of natural disasters mod installed that generates large fire events.
2)your server got hacked by a griefer (not very likely at all)
3)you or your friend are attempting a prank
Minecraft firespreading and fire starting mechanics allow for any type of block to catch fire, but unless there's a large amount of flammable blocks extremely close by (ie, a very dense forest or jungle or a house) fire generally does not spread very far at all before burning out.
The doFireTick gamerule controls both spread and extinguishablity [ https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Commands/gamerule ] , setting this to false would give permanent fires that did not spread.
Fire spreading was more agressive in earlier versions, but what is described by the OP still seems more a glitch than anything I would expect.... (The burning cobble & quartz seems particularly weird :dunno: )
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Why does everything have to be so stoopid?" Harvey Pekar (from American Splendor)
WARNING: I have an extemely "grindy" playstyle; YMMV โ if this doesn't seem fun to you, mine what you can from it & bin the rest.
2. ... (Who would want to hack a vanilla server with 5 users online at it's peak?)
3. There was nobody online except me and him and it would be pointless honestly to play a prank for absolutely no reason. But again he never left the mine.
4. The fire spreading was obviously on, like a regular Vanilla server, what I don't understand is the fire spreading on non-combustible blocks by itself like cobblestone.
5. There's no way a storm could have produced so much fire. I'm talking a radius of 75 blocks ONLY fire upon blocks.
Side note: Nobody was an Operator in the server. Just in case somebody might think somebody used a wand from WorldEdit or something like that. But again it was 100% Vanilla... So idk.
It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen in my 6 years of playing Minecraft and it still is, whether this goes solved or unsolved.
what I don't understand is the fire spreading on non-combustible blocks by itself like cobblestone.
That's completely normal. In Minecraft, nothing catches fire due to flammability, given a nearby source of fire cobblestone or dirt (both flagged as nonflammable) have just as much chance to catch fire as wood or leaves (two blocks that are flagged as flammable). Flammability seems to only determine how quickly fire will spread OR how quickly that block will be destroyed by the fire, but I'm not exactly sure which (or if it's both).
Regarding your scenario, after thinking on it more, I think it is because the fire was in a lazy chunk, or possibly that your movements (as a group) caused the fire-containing chunks to move in and out of lazy mode at a rate that allowed fire spread to happen but prevented fires from going out (at least going out at a rate faster than they were spreading). Since the number of fire entities was increasing, there were increasingly more chances for more spreading and thus the massive footprint of the fire when you discovered it.
This is EXACTLY the same "bug" that is referenced in render-distance issues related to mob grinder rates. Perhaps this makes it a far more serious issue than the mere loss of some/all of the 70 hostile mob cap (not sure if that's actually a valid conclusion given that much of the fire would quickly burn out, but it's important to note that there's no cap on non-mob entities). Assuming, of course, that this didn't already get addressed as a result of the upcoming 1.13 optimizations.
Whoops, silly me wrote out a long post explaining what (I think) was going on and then stupidly pressed the back button by mistake...
The short version is that the bug that causes less hostile mobs over time for render distances less than 10 also apparently affects other entities such as fire. The gist of the bug is that apparently entity creation (mob spawning, fire creation) is not counted as entity processing (I guess because the entity didn't actually exist yet?) and therefore can occur in lazy chunks whereas entity activity (fire spreading/extinguishing, mob AI/despawning/death, etc) cannot.
I'm probably a little bit wrong (for example, maybe fire cannot be created in a lazy chunk so it started in an active chunk first then moved into a lazy state), but this would indicate the "render distance bug" has a much more serious underlying component that probably should be more thoroughly addressed--assuming it hasn't already been accounted for in the upcoming 1.13 changes.
The short version is that the bug that causes less hostile mobs over time for render distances less than 10 also apparently affects other entities such as fire. The gist of the bug is that apparently entity creation (mob spawning, fire creation) is not counted as entity processing (I guess because the entity didn't actually exist yet?) and therefore can occur in lazy chunks whereas entity activity (fire spreading/extinguishing, mob AI/despawning/death, etc) cannot.
Fie is not an entity, not even a tile entity, and is not affected by the render distance bug, it is simply a block which responds to block updates (much as water spreads or crops grow); block updates depend on how many chunks are loaded and that's it; there isn't even a single "lazy chunk" around the edges of the world, only a check for whether chunks are loaded within 8 blocks so only the outermost 8 blocks do not receive updates (basically, half a "lazy chunk"):
Also, the render distance bug actually occurs because entities are not ticked and thus cannot despawn unless a 5x5 chunk area around them is loaded, but the game can spawn them less than 2 chunks away from the edge of loaded chunks (in fact, it can even try to spawn them in unloaded chunks since the spawn radius is fixed) and/or they don't immediately despawn before the game stops ticking them when the render distance is less than 10 (128 blocks = 8 chunks; 8 + 2 = 10). I've confirmed this by reducing the despawn radius to 96 blocks (6 chunks) and the view distance to 8 chunks with no issues (in 1.6.4 the default view distance is 10, which loads unnecessary chunks when on Normal (8 chunk) render distance (this reduces loaded/generated chunks from 441 to 289, a 45% reduction, and also matches the update radius of maps, if square instead of circular). Also, the block update radius in 1.6.4 is fixed at 7 chunks so this has no effect on block updates).
In addition, an update since 1.6.4 seems to have cranked up fire spread because I see quite a lot of people mentioning massive forest fires (practically entire forests burning) in current versions, for example, yet I've only seen a single case (in nearly 5 years) where lightning definitely started a fire (in a mod biome with massive trees; only a few burned) and the burn area around lava lakes is minimal (the Wiki does say that 1.9 reduced the chance of rain putting out fire but that can't explain the spreading that I've seen; the aforementioned fire was still burning after it stopped raining and appeared to have started below the canopy, where rain couldn't get to it, and from all the phantom light glitches it had been at the edge of loaded chunks (the game does not update the light level of a block unless the chunks within 17 blocks of it are loaded, meaning that updates to fires within 9-16 blocks of the edge will not update light levels, which as far as I know is the only consequence of fires at the edge of loaded chunks).
This was about 2 years ago.... Or whenever the latest MC version was still 1.8.8 and me and my friends made a server, to.. you know... Just enjoy time together... So this one Sunday it was just me and one of my friends online and we decided to both go mine in the tunnel we just dug out. We went together to mine and after a fairly long mining session, we decide to return home only to find the entire village (near where we settled) and all the grass, crops, houses on fire. And I'm not talking only wood. I'm talking cobblestone, grass, wood (obviously) ,quartz, etc. You name it. ALL ON FIRE. This fire had a radius of about 70 to 100 blocks around the village. Only me and my friend were online, nobody else was, we were both next to each other when we descended into the mine and ascended too. Nobody else joined, no fire was present prior to that. Nobody had a chimney and there was no blacksmith in the village (if there was the lava might have caused part of it to go on fire) This mystery of mine still remains unsolved after years of thinking back to it... So I was wondering if anybody would have any ideas on how this all took place. Yes, I'm sure I wasnt daydreaming, and plus there would be no point for me to make this up. I looked this up multiple times online but never got results that matched what i experienced. I'm sure I have screenshots of this somewhere, and I will post them here, when I go on a scavenger hunt through my Minecraft screenshots. If anybody knows anything or can suggest something, you're than welcome to reply to this. โ๏ธ
Umm, probably a lightning strike (or several) occurred. You apparently have the doFireTick gamerule turned off, which makes it so that any fires that get started will last forever instead of consuming flammable blocks (it's a common setting for server play so if you didn't set this yourself maybe the server was preconfigured for it). It sounds like fire spreading (which I think is a separate gamerule?) was still on, allowing it to eventually cover a large area.
The alternatives are:
1)you're playing modded and have some sort of natural disasters mod installed that generates large fire events.
2)your server got hacked by a griefer (not very likely at all)
3)you or your friend are attempting a prank
Minecraft firespreading and fire starting mechanics allow for any type of block to catch fire, but unless there's a large amount of flammable blocks extremely close by (ie, a very dense forest or jungle or a house) fire generally does not spread very far at all before burning out.
The doFireTick gamerule controls both spread and extinguishablity [ https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Commands/gamerule ] , setting this to false would give permanent fires that did not spread.
Fire spreading was more agressive in earlier versions, but what is described by the OP still seems more a glitch than anything I would expect.... (The burning cobble & quartz seems particularly weird :dunno: )
1. No, it was not modded. It was fully Vanilla.
2. ... (Who would want to hack a vanilla server with 5 users online at it's peak?)
3. There was nobody online except me and him and it would be pointless honestly to play a prank for absolutely no reason. But again he never left the mine.
4. The fire spreading was obviously on, like a regular Vanilla server, what I don't understand is the fire spreading on non-combustible blocks by itself like cobblestone.
5. There's no way a storm could have produced so much fire. I'm talking a radius of 75 blocks ONLY fire upon blocks.
Side note: Nobody was an Operator in the server. Just in case somebody might think somebody used a wand from WorldEdit or something like that. But again it was 100% Vanilla... So idk.
It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen in my 6 years of playing Minecraft and it still is, whether this goes solved or unsolved.
Haha from the title of the thread I thought your computer caught on fire. Glad that wasn't the case.
I figured some people would have thought about it ๐๐
That's completely normal. In Minecraft, nothing catches fire due to flammability, given a nearby source of fire cobblestone or dirt (both flagged as nonflammable) have just as much chance to catch fire as wood or leaves (two blocks that are flagged as flammable). Flammability seems to only determine how quickly fire will spread OR how quickly that block will be destroyed by the fire, but I'm not exactly sure which (or if it's both).
Regarding your scenario, after thinking on it more, I think it is because the fire was in a lazy chunk, or possibly that your movements (as a group) caused the fire-containing chunks to move in and out of lazy mode at a rate that allowed fire spread to happen but prevented fires from going out (at least going out at a rate faster than they were spreading). Since the number of fire entities was increasing, there were increasingly more chances for more spreading and thus the massive footprint of the fire when you discovered it.
This is EXACTLY the same "bug" that is referenced in render-distance issues related to mob grinder rates. Perhaps this makes it a far more serious issue than the mere loss of some/all of the 70 hostile mob cap (not sure if that's actually a valid conclusion given that much of the fire would quickly burn out, but it's important to note that there's no cap on non-mob entities). Assuming, of course, that this didn't already get addressed as a result of the upcoming 1.13 optimizations.
Whoops, silly me wrote out a long post explaining what (I think) was going on and then stupidly pressed the back button by mistake...
The short version is that the bug that causes less hostile mobs over time for render distances less than 10 also apparently affects other entities such as fire. The gist of the bug is that apparently entity creation (mob spawning, fire creation) is not counted as entity processing (I guess because the entity didn't actually exist yet?) and therefore can occur in lazy chunks whereas entity activity (fire spreading/extinguishing, mob AI/despawning/death, etc) cannot.
I'm probably a little bit wrong (for example, maybe fire cannot be created in a lazy chunk so it started in an active chunk first then moved into a lazy state), but this would indicate the "render distance bug" has a much more serious underlying component that probably should be more thoroughly addressed--assuming it hasn't already been accounted for in the upcoming 1.13 changes.
Fie is not an entity, not even a tile entity, and is not affected by the render distance bug, it is simply a block which responds to block updates (much as water spreads or crops grow); block updates depend on how many chunks are loaded and that's it; there isn't even a single "lazy chunk" around the edges of the world, only a check for whether chunks are loaded within 8 blocks so only the outermost 8 blocks do not receive updates (basically, half a "lazy chunk"):
Also, the render distance bug actually occurs because entities are not ticked and thus cannot despawn unless a 5x5 chunk area around them is loaded, but the game can spawn them less than 2 chunks away from the edge of loaded chunks (in fact, it can even try to spawn them in unloaded chunks since the spawn radius is fixed) and/or they don't immediately despawn before the game stops ticking them when the render distance is less than 10 (128 blocks = 8 chunks; 8 + 2 = 10). I've confirmed this by reducing the despawn radius to 96 blocks (6 chunks) and the view distance to 8 chunks with no issues (in 1.6.4 the default view distance is 10, which loads unnecessary chunks when on Normal (8 chunk) render distance (this reduces loaded/generated chunks from 441 to 289, a 45% reduction, and also matches the update radius of maps, if square instead of circular). Also, the block update radius in 1.6.4 is fixed at 7 chunks so this has no effect on block updates).
In addition, an update since 1.6.4 seems to have cranked up fire spread because I see quite a lot of people mentioning massive forest fires (practically entire forests burning) in current versions, for example, yet I've only seen a single case (in nearly 5 years) where lightning definitely started a fire (in a mod biome with massive trees; only a few burned) and the burn area around lava lakes is minimal (the Wiki does say that 1.9 reduced the chance of rain putting out fire but that can't explain the spreading that I've seen; the aforementioned fire was still burning after it stopped raining and appeared to have started below the canopy, where rain couldn't get to it, and from all the phantom light glitches it had been at the edge of loaded chunks (the game does not update the light level of a block unless the chunks within 17 blocks of it are loaded, meaning that updates to fires within 9-16 blocks of the edge will not update light levels, which as far as I know is the only consequence of fires at the edge of loaded chunks).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?