Has Pause changed recently?

[Thorfinn]

My great nephew is running VS on an i3 (don't ask ) and I was helping him update to 1.18.6. It used to be that whatever he used for pause (maybe just sitting on the "choose your character" screen -- I didn't quite understand what he was talking about) would let the game chug along and do the mapgen. He would come back an hour later after his disk drive had calmed down, and could play just fine, once the world had been generated. But it appears that does not run in the pause anymore, nor does it appear mapgen will run in the background with the handbook pause. 

Is there a way to get that back apart from running it as a server and using a throwaway character who just nerdpoles to generate the world and dies to the wolves and bears who surround his nerdpole by the time it is done? Which is suboptimal, as just sitting there means a couple days closer to winter...

[Streetwind]

From 1.17.7 forwards, the game will pause when the player opens the handbook in singleplayer mode. This was a much and long requested improvement among the playerbase. (Obviously no change in behavior in multiplayer).

Perhaps your nephew used to open the handbook to let the world generate? But no, that wouldn't have been a true and proper pause in old versions, meaning that time would pass, the character would grow hungry, and enemies could attack the player. So it can't have been that.

The choose-your-character screen was also upgraded from simply freezing the ingame time progression (which still left you vulnerable to attacks and hunger) to a true pause in one of the more recent versions. Can't for the life of me remember which one though.

I just tested in 1.15.9, which is the oldest version I still have lying around. Even back then, a true pause did not allow world generation to proceed in the background; everything is completely stopped. So whatever your nephew used, it was never a true pause. Just something that felt like it. Probably the character creation screen.

 

[Thorfinn]

Thanks!

I think I did figure out what he was talking about, though. It was using the /pause command from Single Player Handbook Pause mod, which no longer works. That evidently was not a true pause either, but it did stop time, prevent hunger, and creatures stopped moving about, but curiously did not prevent one from interacting with the world. The background processes apparently ran to completion. I don't have any personal knowledge of it, but I'm halfways tempted to download it and add it to 1.16 and see what it did.