Federation Of Kaos: Chunk Anchor

Keep your base running while you're away. Without wrecking the server.

Chunk Anchor adds one block. Place it and its chunk stays loaded and ticking with nobody around: crops grow, furnaces smelt and redstone keeps running, so the farm is still working when you get back from a trip 800 blocks away.

It is a chunk loader built for shared servers: a strict per-player limit, anchors that switch off when their owner logs off, and no per-tick cost of its own.

It comes with:

• One craftable block that keeps exactly one chunk loaded and ticking ⚓
• A hard limit of two anchors per player, counted across every dimension 🔒
• Anchors that go idle 30 minutes after you log off and wake the moment you return 🌙
• No block entity and no ticker: Forge's own chunk tickets do the holding ⚙️
• A glowing block, action-bar status and a particle trace of the chunk edge, so you always know what is loaded ✨
• Three server config keys, two commands, no dependencies 📜

🌾 Your farm keeps working with nobody there

While a Chunk Anchor is placed, its chunk is held with the same strength as vanilla's /forceload: fully ticking, exactly as if a player were standing in it. Crops grow, furnaces and brewing stands finish, redstone clocks keep cycling, and the animals and item entities already in the chunk keep ticking.

Natural mob spawning is untouched. Vanilla only spawns mobs near players, so a remote anchored chunk does not fill up with monsters while you are gone.

Place an anchor and the block lights up, the action bar reads Chunk Anchor online: chunk [x, z] held (1/2), and a line of end-rod particles traces the edge of the chunk one block above the anchor, so you can see exactly what is covered. Right-click any anchor, yours or not, to see its owner, whether it is held or idle, and the chunk edge again.

🔒 Two per player. That is the whole budget.

Each player may own two anchors at once, counted across every dimension, and each anchor holds only its own chunk. Try to place a third and the server refuses it and lists where your current two are. Two is enough for a farm that crosses a chunk border, or a farm plus a smelting line. It is deliberately not enough to keep a whole base running.

For server owners that means a hard upper bound: forced chunks never exceed players × anchors per player, and only for players who are online or have just left. The limit is a server config (0 to 64).

🌙 Goes idle when you leave, wakes when you are back

Thirty minutes after its owner logs off, an anchor goes dark, its lamp turns red and the chunk is released. The clock runs on real time and survives server restarts, so a player who left a week ago is not quietly loading chunks the whole time. The moment the owner logs back in, every one of their anchors is lit and held again.

The grace period is a server config: 0 releases on logout, -1 never releases, or any number of minutes up to a week.

⚙️ Costs the server nothing between events

The anchor has no block entity and no block ticker. Forge's own chunk-ticket system holds the chunk and persists it across restarts. The mod only reacts to events (place, break, use, login, logout, chunk load, world load) plus a once-a-minute check for owners past their grace period. Records whose block vanished while the chunk was unloaded, after a crash or outside editing, are cleaned up automatically the next time the chunk, the owner or the world loads.

Want it lighter still? Set tickChunks = false and anchored chunks stay loaded but stop ticking: machines pause, but the chunk never unloads.

Breaking, exploding or replacing an anchor releases its chunk at once. Pistons cannot move it.

📜 Recipe

Shaped recipe. The cost (three obsidian, an ender pearl and a compass) puts it in the early-to-mid game; the per-player cap, not the cost, is the real limiter.

Mine it with any pickaxe; it drops itself and has the blast resistance of obsidian. You will find it in the mod's own creative tab and under Functional Blocks. JEI shows the recipe automatically if installed.

🛠 Commands

• /fokanchor list: your anchors, with dimension, position and whether each is held or idle.
• /fokanchor all: every anchor on the server, with its owner (operators only).

🧩 Server config

world/serverconfig/fok_chunk_anchor-server.toml

• anchorsPerPlayer = 2. Anchors one player may have placed at once, across all dimensions (0 to 64).
• tickChunks = true. On: anchored chunks tick fully. Off: kept loaded only, which is cheaper but pauses machines.
• offlineGraceMinutes = 30. Real-time minutes after the owner logs off before their anchors go idle. 0 = on logout, -1 = never.

The item tooltip reads the live server config, so players always see the real limit and offline behaviour of the server they are on.

✅ Requirements

• Minecraft 1.20.1 with Forge 47 or newer.
• No other mod dependencies.
• Install on both the client and the server. All logic runs server-side.

Part of Federation Of Kaos

Chunk Anchor is one of the Federation Of Kaos mods and ships in the Federation Of Kaos modpack, but it is fully standalone: it needs none of the other FOK mods and works in any Forge 1.20.1 pack. You are welcome to include it in your modpack.