Schematics

projects/{project}/locations/{location}/schematics/{schematic}

A schematic is a game server's disk, captured: the build downloaded, the install script run, the world generated. An autoscaling group's members start from one and skip all of that. For a modded server that is the difference between minutes and tens of seconds.

Where they come from

A group makes its own. A group with a warmup_duration starts one server, lets it install and generate its world for that long, captures it, and removes it. Every member then starts from that capture. The warm-up server is not charged for — it exists so your members do not each repeat the same install. See Warm-up.

You can capture one from a running server, for example a world you have set up by hand, and give it to a group of the same game when you create it.

Servers → the server → Capture as schematic

The server keeps running while it is captured. Capturing a server with a world takes minutes, and returns a long-running operation. An ephemeral server cannot be captured — you asked for its data not to be kept.

plany playpute schematics list, get and delete read and remove them; the console lists them at Schematics.

Giving one to a group

Set schematic when you create a group, through the API, to start its members from a capture you already have rather than warming up a new one. That is the faster path for a second group of the same game.

1grpcurl -H "authorization: Bearer $PLANY_API_KEY" \
2  -d '{"parent": "projects/my-game/locations/eu-west-2",
3       "game_server_group_id": "modpack",
4       "game_server_group": {
5         "game": "games/minecraft-java-forge-1-20-4",
6         "schematic": "projects/my-game/locations/eu-west-2/schematics/modpack-warm",
7         "policy": {"min_size": 0, "max_size": 10, "scale_on_waiting_connections": true}}}' \
8  api.plany.cloud:443 plany.playpute.v1.PlayputeService/CreateGameServerGroup

A schematic records the game and the build that were installed when it was taken, and a group can only be given a READY schematic of its own game — starting a Minecraft fleet from a captured Garry's Mod server is refused.

source_game_server names the server it was captured from, and is kept after that server is deleted.

A copy, not a link

Every server started from a schematic gets its own copy of it.

A schematic is not a backup. It is a starting point, taken once and reused.

It is stored, so it is billed

A schematic is charged for storage from the moment the capture completes until you delete it, on its size_bytes, whether or not anything starts from it.

microvm-schematic-storage-gib-hour — $0.000032 per GiB-hour, with the first 20 GiB-hours each month free. A capture in progress, a failed one, and one being deleted are not charged.