I'm wondering when is the best time for a new Tile Entity to examine the world around it? I've poked around the code which suggests that validate() seems to be the only opportunity during the block creation lifecycle when the tile entity knows it's coordinates.

 

Or perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree and I should be initializing on the server during the first updateEntity call?

 

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Like you said, I think the best thing would be to have a simple 'initialised' boolean field, and just do it in the first updateEntity call.

Unfortunately validate() cannot be relied upon, as it can be called before the chunk is loaded entirely (e.g. it gets called for each tile entity when that tile is loaded, not for all tiles in a chunk after the chunk loads completely).  This causes issues when 'examinig the world' as most of the nearby world will not exist/not be loaded.

 

As suggested, a simple boolean flag works, check/set it your updateEntity() method.  UpdateEntity is only called after the entire chunk is loaded, ensuring the world is ready to be queried.

 

My personal method was lazy cache lookup -- I don't build a neighbor tile cache until something tries to access it.  As the access can only occur from a tiles updateEntity method (in my case anyhow), this ensures that the world is loaded before the cache is ever built.