Gate

A faction-owned wall of blocks that opens and closes when a redstone trigger block is powered.

A gate is a rectangular region of blocks owned by a Faction that fills and empties itself in response to redstone. It is the castle-drawbridge affordance: a wall you can open without breaking it.

The record

MfGate stores a cuboid area, a single trigger block position, the material to fill the area with, and a status. It does not store the blocks themselves — the material plus the area is enough to reconstruct the wall.

Guarded against unloaded chunks

Both shouldOpen() and shouldClose() begin by resolving the trigger's world and checking isChunkLoaded before touching the block, returning false if either fails. This is the load-bearing detail: a gate whose trigger sits in an unloaded chunk must be treated as unchanged, not as unpowered. Reading a block in an unloaded chunk would force a synchronous chunk load on the server thread — a stall on the main thread every tick, for every gate on the server.

The consequence players see is that a gate only responds while someone is nearby enough to keep its trigger loaded.

Four states, not two

MfGateStatus is OPEN, OPENING, CLOSED, CLOSING. The transitional states exist because a gate does not change in one tick — it is animated block by block, and a gate caught mid-open must not be told to open again.

Because the status is persisted rather than inferred from the blocks, the plugin knows what a gate believes it is after a restart, and after the area's blocks have been altered by other means.

Related

Gates are one of the record types carried across by Legacy Data Migration, so the format predates the current database schema.