Trying to decide if Sponge is right for me

Sponge
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I’m trying to determine whether it’s worth it or not to use Sponge. I don’t know much about Sponge, so I figured I’d ask a few questions and see what you guys have to say.

I’m running a Forge server in 1.12.2. We have around 80 mods – yes, really! – and we aren’t willing to part with a single one. But we have a problem, and for the life of me I can’t find a good solution.

Our server will have quest zones, dungeons, and massive sprawling cities, all of which need to be protected from hostile mobs and griefing. This was easy to do with Forge Essentials, but that mod is sadly now defunct, with no 1.12.2 version available. I see that some Sponge plugins can do this, like Nucleus… but is Sponge the right option for me?

  • Does Sponge Forge work with every Forge mod, or only certain ones?

  • Is Sponge a resource-hog? Will it gobble up the server’s RAM or cause lag? Because we’re already running 80 mods, and our server only has 10 GB of memory, which gets eaten up quickly when you get 20 or 30 people flying Minecraft Transport Simulator airplanes everywhere. RAM usage matters. It matters a lot.

  • Is Sponge single-threaded or multi-threaded?

  • Is this worth getting, or is there a simpler alternative – say, a forge mod I’m unaware of – that makes more sense for solving this issue?

Any help here would be greatly appreciated. I’d offer you diamonds but chances are most of you won’t join our server, lol.

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  • SpongeForge should work with most Forge mods. If not, file an issue.
  • Sponge actually tries to optimize some CPU usage, and takes steps to minimize RAM overhead.
  • Pretty much everything based on the official Minecraft server is single-threaded. Plugins can use other threads to do certain things, but cannot touch the game world from other threads.
  • If you’re looking for protection stuff, Sponge provides one of the most comprehensive action tracking systems (we call it “cause tracking”) available in the Minecraft community. You pretty much can’t get it anywhere else.

I don’t recommend using Nucleus to protect from other players. All the Nucleus protection module does is prevent players or mobs from messing with farmland. However, there are a bunch of other protection plugins available for Sponge that work really well, thanks to Sponge’s cause tracking system.

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Thank you, JBYoshi! I suppose I’ll back up the server and give Sponge a try. I’ve been looking at the list of plugins and there are some pretty nifty ones out there, so it’s worth giving a go.

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Welcome to the Weird Worlds of Sponge!

A lot of what you have asked has been answered in the SpongeDocs. Sponge contains many optional optimisations and tweaks.

Moreover, if you’re looking for Protection for a modded server, it is possible with SpongeForge. You’d need a plugin like FoxGuard, GriefPrevention, UniverseGuard or RedProtect, all of which are available for Sponge, amongst a plethora of other plugins here on these forums, and on Ore.

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