The main issue

FAWE which is short for FastAsyncWorldEdit has problems every now and then, mainly resulting in schematics not pasting everything, reverting changes not fully happening and just all around weird behavior when it comes to copy-pasting or making big changes in general. This often leads to corrupted builds and frustration among users which I absolutely understand but there is very little we can do about these problems and I want to make everyone understand why in this article.

There have also been numerous attempts of mine and other staff members throughout the last 12 months to figure out where these issues are coming from, we've attempted everything from assigning more RAM to reading Timings and Spark outputs, trying to reproduce this exact issue consistently and we never even once succeeded.

This issue seems so sporadic it seems almost hopeless to even get a grasp of it.

To get things straight…

I am not trying to hate on the idea behind FAWE nor do I not want to give the users of MetaUnion support with FAWE issues, it's just that this particular one seems impossible to troubleshoot or get even close to fixing it or figuring out what's even happening. Also the support that FAWE is providing towards this problem (as can be seen in several examples that I provide) is next to none.

And to get some of my frustration off too, I've created this list of sources that hint to why FAWE seems to be the pile of steaming junk I think it is:

1. A well regarded developer of the PaperMC project (called kennytv) even added FAWE to their list of shame (just search for "FastAsync" with your browser): https://github.com/kennytv/list-of-shame Their comment simply says "Fast async world exception" - Fast, fast at breaking things. And I couldn't agree more after having spent so much time trying to figure out this exact issue.
2. Here are numerous issues of the same kind reported on their Discord server (you'll have to join https://discord.gg/intellectualsites to be able to see them): https://discord.com/channels/268444645527126017/344128526435221505/1006797684859994193 https://discord.com/channels/268444645527126017/344128526435221505/967837939407134720 https://discord.com/channels/268444645527126017/344128526435221505/1036369146335723611 https://discord.com/channels/268444645527126017/344128526435221505/1031244614570614884 https://discord.com/channels/268444645527126017/344128526435221505/694490408239235082 https://discord.com/channels/268444645527126017/344128526435221505/673504450207285249 This last one dates back to February 2020, just to give you an idea of how long this problem has existed.
3. This GitHub issue that hasn't seen any updates in 4 months (as of writing) nor any real acknowledgement besides the usual "it works for me" response from NotMyFault (yup, fitting name…): https://github.com/IntellectualSites/FastAsyncWorldEdit/issues/1861 - which was finally resolved in Jun 1 2023

4. And lastly the official WorldEdit (by the EngineHub team) Discord server also states that they do not recommend running FAWE. They even got an auto reply on their bot that says this:

   Forks of WorldEdit such as FAWE, AWE, and others, are not recommended for compatibility and safety reasons.

   and it used to say this up until February 2022:

   [AutoReply] @<user> FastAsyncWorldEdit is not supported. It is known to cause stability and compatibility issues.

Then why do you still use FAWE and not something else?

Too many plugins that builders rely on are built on FAWE only and do not allow me to use any other alternative. These plugins are goBrush, goPaint and Arceon. Another reason is that with regular WorldEdit the server would simply crash from the massive things that builders often create and thus I can't use it either.

Regular WorldEdit would solve the problem of random fragments that I complained about in this article but it would also lag the server to death so do I really have a choice?