So I have run a minecraft server for so long, but in that time we also started multiple spawns, and additional worlds. Pretty much no one plays on the server anymore and most of the worlds fell into archive status, so I got the idea, I never want to lose anybodies work and I like to personally just stroll around the world and find stuff someone built.
I decided to try and merge all the worlds together into one big super world. I used MCA selector to filter all the chunks that had more than a certain amount of play time and purge the rest, then afterward I copied all those chunks onto the biggest world, trying to find a decent spot on the map for them to go.
The world is still a bit of a mess but I hope that this gives me a nice base line to just continue to play it at my own pace and clean it up in game.
My plan is to go through the various spawn points and just work out and clean up the paths from place to place and peoples builds that didnt come back.
I also deleted everyones inventory, which is kind of sucky but at the same time I think if anyone does ever come back having a partial fresh start makes the game fun again. A big reason for this was players played on multiple worlds so I didn't have a good way to pick and choose which inventory to keep for the hundreds of players over the years.
Having one world instead of like 5 makes it much easier to keep up with, updating the plugins etc. also the backups are much nicer, instead of 70gb servers now its less than 15 after the purge. all the original servers were kept the way they were but taken offline.
Amazing.