Connect to a Friend's Master Shard

[giovcavalc]

For starters, from what a read, what I'm looking for just isn't currently possible.

I got myself into the idea of getting to play on my own DST World (which I enjoy doing a lot) while also having portals connecting to my friend's worlds. That way each person could enjoy playing their own way, on their own pace, with their own style and it would still be easy enough to join up with the gang to achieve something bigger together and help each other out.

To figure things out I read about the shard system on this post:

From what I understand, what I desired just isn't possible. Since there is an established pattern where there needs to be a single master shard to which the others are connected, there shouldn't be a way to make a migration portal to an entirely separate world with it's own master.

Now, 'cause I already came to the conclusion that I couldn't get what I wanted from the shards system I wanted two things out of this post:
1. Confirmation that my understanding is correct or else a possible solution to achieve what I desired

2. To try and get an explanation as to why connecting to an entirely separate world isn't a possibility with the current shard system. The expectation I had was that the portal could just be a link to the other world. If the other server wasn't up the portal would just be locked - like it happens when you're in a secondary shard and rollback, since the rollback starts from the main shard the other portals appear closed while the main shard is unavailable.

I could make a setup that tecnically works the way I wanted: which is having shards for each of my friend's worlds connected to my master and then have them connect to my server instead of theirs. But this solution lacks the autonomy of being able to still host each world separately and allow them to play by themselves if I wasn't available to host the server.

[Daniel86268]

Confirmed, you can't connect multiple server clusters with their own masters to eachother.

And as you've deduced, it is possible to connect your two shards to your friend's master server (or vice versa).

Once these are connected, it is also possible to travel from one slave shard to another, without visiting the master shard. That also includes the sinkholes and staircases that are usually used to travel between your worlds, you just have to manually connect them. (either using the shard connection mod, or completely manually) This way it would feel like you are playing on your own map, but, if you spawn another sinkhole, which allows you to travel to your friend's world, you can connect to said world.

To have these dynamicially either be independant, or connect to another master server, I'd just create two seperate launch scripts, one of which edits the config files to connect to the other master before launching the server (and afterwards reverts the changes), and the other one just starts the server normally.

Remember to do a full backup of your entire Server installation before you try any of this.

Good luck!