One server that owns the truth
Your client does not run the game. It suggests things: I moved here, I swung this pickaxe, I placed this wall. The server decides whether any of it actually happened. If the server did not validate it, it did not happen.
Resource deposits show why that matters. The server knows where every vein sits; your client knows nothing about them until you walk within 30 metres of one. You cannot datamine the map or scan ahead. You find resources by exploring.
The server runs on a fixed 20 Hz tick. Twenty times a second it resolves every pending action against a single authoritative game state, movement, harvesting, terrain edits, NPC behaviour, all in the same loop, in the same order, on the same clock.
Each client only receives what is near it: instead of broadcasting the whole world, the server rebuilds each client's visible set every tick. Persistence runs outside the tick loop, so gameplay never waits on a save; edits, claims, and consumed resources are written durably in the background.
- Tick rate: 20 Hz (50 ms per tick), single authoritative game state.
- Interest management: per-client view radius, rebuilt every tick.
- Spatial indexing: a uniform grid with broad-phase cells for proximity queries.
- Persistence: Postgres + PostGIS, durable writes off the main tick loop.