MC Data Bridge - Release Notes (v2.1.6)

Overview

Version 2.1.6 is a comprehensive feature and security update that introduces multi-server Companion & Pet Synchronization, implements dynamic Full Vanilla Player Statistics Synchronization, completes database schema normalization, adds compressed binary NBT serialization, embeds a Prometheus Metrics Exporter, and hardens overall network security with strict seed verification.

Key Features & Improvements

📊 Full Vanilla Player Statistics Synchronization

• Dynamic Statistics Sync: Replaced the legacy hardcoded list of 16 statistics with a dynamic, version-independent synchronization loop that covers all vanilla player statistics.
• Qualified/Typed Statistics Support: Fully syncs all typed statistics requiring qualifiers—including blocks mined, items crafted/used/broken/picked up/dropped, and entities killed or killed by (e.g., MINE_BLOCK:STONE, KILL_ENTITY:ZOMBIE, USE_ITEM:IRON_PICKAXE).
• Intelligent State Application: Minimizes database updates and server overhead by only applying statistic changes when values differ from the server's current values.
• State Cleanup & Resets: Restores synchronization parity by resetting any non-zero stats on the destination server that are not present in the player's database snapshot (setting them back to zero).
• Graceful Version Resilience: Silently handles version-specific or custom blocks, items, and entity types, maintaining perfect compatibility across heterogeneous multi-server environments.

🐾 Companion & Pet Synchronization

• Multi-Mode Synchronization: Added companions.mode (follow, return, untracked) to manage how pets are synced across the network.
• Tamed Pet Persistence: Synchronizes tamed wolves, cats, parrots, and other pets across server switches.
• Shoulder-Perched Entity Serialization: Saves and restores parrot shoulder-riding states.
• State Preservation: Restores ownership, custom names, health/max health, and sitting status accurately.
• NBT-Level Preservation: Utilizes NBTAPI metadata merging to preserve custom pet attributes, items, and collars.
• Merge-on-Save Pattern: Adopts a robust relational state merging strategy to prevent NBT overrides and companion data loss across servers (critical for return mode).
• Duplication Prevention: Despawns source entities synchronously upon snapshot generation to prevent duplication exploits.

🗄️ Relational Component Schema Normalization

• Companions Component Table: Introduced the databridge_companions table for row-level normalized storage.
• Optimized SQL Transactions: Avoids write-amplification by target-updating specific components (inventories, statistics, metadata, companions) independently.

⚡ Binary NBT Serialization Option

• Compressed NBT Storage: Adds support for native binary compression (serialization-format: binary) to dramatically reduce database footprint, storage I/O, and CPU serialization overhead.

🛡️ Production Security Hardening

• Fails-Strict Safe Mode: Prevents startup if the default cryptographic seed is detected and no secure seed is configured, mitigating identity hijacking risks.
• DDL Column Whitelists: Enforces SQL parameter and column sanitation to secure automated schema migration queries.

📊 Embedded Prometheus Metrics Exporter

• Live Server Metrics: Provides an optional HTTP /metrics scrape endpoint for Grafana/Prometheus tracking, exposing cache efficiency, database connection pool statistics, active transaction counts, and synchronization latencies.

For installation instructions and configuration details, please refer to the README.md and config.yml.