Struggling to keep small community server going with the updates

[hexed hazel]

Craftoria worked great and we were having a blast with a group of 6 to 8 people! Barely ever crashed and the adventures and mods are well put together! But even since we tried to update to 1.21 or further, we had issues. I as admin/host for one get 'connection lost' right away after I join, the server resets. I think it's because of something where I spawn at or have equipped. Also, at some point, whenever another person joined in another kept getting thrown out or the server would lose connection and restart too. A friend of mine found a bug (ironbooks) that temporarily fixed it by updating it to a certain version. We waited out updates until it would get more stable. But now I am scared to upgrade since quite a few mods got removed (that some users used) and we won't know what will happen if we do update with the current world save. Some in the community are tech savvy, but we still can't figure it out. It it also my first time hosting via bisect. I don't really know what to ask or to do, I am hoping for advice! Thanks in advance.

(Also I ADORE the All of Fabric series, I didn't know it was made from the same group! Thank you for all these amazing modpacks and the work put in them).

[stuck comet]

if you are concerned, i think the first step would be to backup the current server instance (copy all files from the server to some location, including mods, configs, world folder, etc)

once done, there shouldnt be a concern about losing anything since you can always restore to the point before you updated.

next, i would recommend, if possible, you take a copy of that server, locally, and update one version at a time, locally. (download server pack, replace yaml file and scripts, run startserver script. connect to localhost to test)

There were some issues with some mods, so they were removed. current additional issues that i know about off the top of my head are GTBC's spellbook (which improperly uses Iron's api, and iron's doesnt actually check if the api is being used right so it crashes), an issue with immediately fast (causes issues with geckolib especially with glowing entities. there has been an update to imFast since then). There were also issues with the Alshanex's Familiars just spam spawning entities until servers died, and Mowzie's Mobs crashing under several conditions.

so, tldr:
backup server
copy backup on local computer and update one version at a time
read changelogs/announcements for the versions as you update
if your client crashes, either ask here with a crashlog or keep updating a version at a time 😛
if your server crashes, come back and post the crash report
if your client is kicked out, post the latest.log from server and client

this should alleviate concerns of instability.

note: i have seen some initial entity count issues with Re:Animal, so keep that in mind as you get to the latest version.

[true vale]

Hello! Looks like Linguardium pretty much covered it but if you need any further assistance I am happy to help. Feel free to ping me.