Today will go down in history as the 14,000 Bees Incident of June 19th.

Some context: I just recently started a little server for friends I'm calling "the Stupid SMP". Unsurprisingly, people wanted to play it. Unfortunately, the server lags, chokes, and dies with more than 3 people on it.

I was going through the internet trying to find some performance mods, as you do in this sort of situation, and I found a few that looked promising. So I installed them, thinking nothing of it.

The first red flag was that it was spamming the server log. When the server world was loading, it would spam the log with something along the lines of "found duplicate uuid, replacing(minecraft:bee)". This was kinda weird, but I just figured that it was actually fixing a problem, as it was doing it to a lot of other mobs.

For about the first 20 minutes, the server was playable, albeit a bit laggy for some reason. I went out to gather oil, as you do, when suddenly, in the middle of draining natural resources, my game went from Frames Per Second to Seconds Per Frame.

It was insane. I was getting a frame about every 2 seconds. The game was unplayable. I was getting mobbed by mobs because it was night. I had to vacate the area, which I did as swiftly as the game would let me allow(not very). As soon as I did, it stopped. I was very confused. What was happening? Did it have to do with the performance mods I just installed? Surely it wouldn't effect clientside that badly, right??

Alas, I had left some very valuable materials at the oil drilling site, and needed to grab it. After running through the lag and insane amount of mobs(why were there so many mobs), I was able to secure the fluid tank with oil in it, and after a very laggy 3 minutes I was off to my house.

Suddenly, I noticed a few bees. "That's strange, I haven't seen this many bees in a while. And it's night, aren't they supposed to be in their hives?"

The next frame loaded. My jaw dropped.

What I was seeing was about 100+ bees. That was a lot of bees. And they certainly weren't taking too kindly to the idea of me playing my game.

Hurriedly, I tabbed over to the console, and typed a kill command for only bees.

what in sam hill's name is this

I quickly tabbed back over to my game. I saw that the console command had taken effect, but it was still lagging. After a long, agonizing moment, the game stopped lagging and I was back to not quite 60 fps.

Me, being stupid and naive, thought the problem was solved, and waltzed back to my house with less cares than I had 60 seconds ago.

Once inside the Tech BasementTM, I went troubleshooting through the modpack, as the game was still laggy serverside. After a few stack overflow crashes, I had the prescence of mind to try the kill command again.

14,500 bees??? i dont even know how to describe this

My jaw throughly agape, I quickly went through to, quite literally, bugfix the server. I quickly came to the correct conclusion that the performance mods I just installed were an issue. After removing them the game ran like a breeze.

After a little while more of playing, a friend hopped on to try and play the server. It crashed very shortly after, as he sent this screenshot in the minecraft server channel.

not quite 14,000 bees. the irony of the chat message makes me laugh

I convinced him to get back on, and ran the kill command again. I think it was about 1,000 bees or so, but I don't remember the exact number because I didn't take a screenshot.

Moral of the story? don't ever install performance mods because they will fill you with bees and cause stack overflow errors

peace, lex