v1.18.9-rc.1 - Idle Server RAM Saver

Dear Extraordinary Survivalists
v1.18.9-rc.1, a unstable release, can now be downloaded through the account manager (section "Other Goodies").

Work on v1.19 is underway! It will likely be a smaller update than usual, but also completed sooner than usual. In the mean time, there are more important changes that we would like to release as part of 1.18 still.
 

Functional silos by ElvisAlligator, shared in #screenshots on Discord

Game updates

• Feature: Game servers can now be launched in standby mode (via command line argument -s). In this mode the server is ready to accept connections from clients, but has not launched yet. As soon as the first connection attempt is made, full server launch commences. This allows server owners to launch servers with very low RAM usage until the first player connects - tests show a 20-fold reduction in RAM usage (557 MB -> 25 MB). This can be used in conjunction with the "Players last online" counter of the /stats command to auto-shutdown idle servers and restart them in standby mode. During standby mode, only the commands /stop and /stats are available.
• Feature: Added new world config to define the despawn time of items dropped on death - only affects those dropped on death, not other dropped items. Can also use /worldconfig droppedItemsTimer command and specifying the time in seconds
• Tweak: Increased raft speed by 33%
• Tweak: Windows Installer: Add option to install .NET 7.0 (if not already present)
• Fixed: Pies in water crashing the game (#3041, thanks Dmitry221060)
• Fixed: More farmland moisture level oddities
• Fixed: Weird visual artifacts in the foliage tinting during certain times of year
• Fixed: --port arg not applying to master server advertising
• Fixed: Massive lag spikes when loading or searching in the public servers list
• Fixed: Rare game crash due to a 3rd party dependency not installed on the system (#3028)
• Fixed: Other players crashing when a player cancels during world load (thanks Dmitry221060)
• Fixed: Rare crashes on Ubuntu v22.04 (including crashes for clients, if the server was running that version of Linux) #2999, #3009, thanks to all who investigated the issue