Being a modder, I created a few things out of blocks. Tap something on the ground, and presto, something interesting, like a giant tree shows up. I had always wondered why it took more than 10 seconds on a screaming-fast gaming machine to display a generated tree that was surely less than 1000 blocks. I found out...

As part of creating another dimension, I generated floating islands. But what good is a floating island if it doesn't move? Even after all the optimization I could possibly muster, changing the absolute minimum number of blocks foe the islands to relocate, the results were still dismal. My islands were small, and slow, or I got severe lag. I appeared to be limited to less than 100 setBlock() calls a second.

Deciding to investigate setBlock() I tracked it down and commented out the Lighting routines. Presto. Instantly 1000 times faster. A ten-second tree generation was now instant. Islands were huge and moved at a nice clip.

Mystery solved.

The bug here, is that the lighting algorithms in setBlock() are what is causing excessive lag, everywhere, all the time. It doesn't take much. If I can only push 100 blocks a second on a high-end screamer, this would explain all the lag on my son's slower machine, and why it doesn't run on my laptop.

So, while my islands and trees now have a few funny shadows, at least I don't lag the game any more!

PLEASE consider re-writing/re-vamping the World.setBlock() lighting algorithms. They are painfully slow.