Reference

Glossary

The words this documentation uses that you may not have met before.

Defined by what each one does for you. The machinery underneath is on how it works.

The things

Fragment: A world your group hosts between them. It behaves like a server you all join, and it is running on the machines of whoever is playing.
The link: What you send a friend so they can find your world: vbf: followed by four words. It finds the world; it does not by itself let anybody in.
Access code: What opens an account during the closed beta. Redeemed once, against your account, and then it has done its job. Not the same as an invite code.
Invite code: A single-use code granting membership of one world, redeemed in the game with /vbf join. It does not tell you where the world is.
Pack: The list of mods a world states it runs. Your game compares it against what you have loaded before you join.
Us: Our part of it. We introduce players to each other, keep track of who holds which ground, and decide who is allowed in. We do not carry your world and we do not simulate anything.

Peer: Somebody else in the world with you, connected to you directly. Every peer runs their own copy and simulates the part they are standing in.
Owner: Whoever created the world. The only person who can change the whitelist, rotate the link or delete it.
Op: A member promoted to help run the world. Can mint invite codes and change the map policy.
Member: Anybody the world has admitted. Members need no account of their own, and joining costs them nothing.

Region: The unit of ground the world is divided into, 512 blocks square. One person simulates each one at a time.
Holding a region: Being the person who decides what happens in it: what ticks, what spawns, what gets written. You hold the ground you are standing on, and it passes to whoever arrives next when you walk away.
Handover: A region passing from one player to another. It happens constantly while people walk about, and it is not something anybody has to do.

Described: Made on the site and not yet generated. Everything about it can still change, including the seed.
Generated: Somebody has pressed Play, and the terrain now exists. The seed and world type are fixed from here on.
Running: At least one person is in it.
Dormant: Nobody is in it. Nothing is ticking, nothing is being charged for, and the saved world is waiting off-site for the next person to arrive.