See everything your server world is doing
The Operations update: live progress and durable history for backups, restores and imports, safe cancel everywhere, and instant server hover cards.
Highlights
- · New Operations tray: everything SpawnBox is working on - backups, restores, imports, diagnostic reports - lives in one place, with progress you can watch and history that survives closing the app.
- · While you were away: if something finished or failed while you were off playing, you come back to a grouped summary and a badge, so results never silently vanish.
- · Failed operations are actionable: every failure row offers Retry when it is safe to offer, and a Get Help button that pre-fills a diagnostic report aimed at exactly what went wrong.
- · Cancel safely: backups, restores, imports and diagnostic reports can be cancelled mid-flight, and the confirm tells you honestly what cancelling means for your world before you commit.
- · Hover over any server tab for an instant card: status, uptime, who is online right now with avatars, and your latest backup - all without clicking away from what you are doing.
- · Progress bars stopped lying: no more import stuck at 0% while the work is actually going fine underneath. Bars only show a number when a real number exists, and they update faster.
- · A fresh install can no longer get permanently stuck at Setting Things Up, and starting a server after everything has gone to sleep now wakes things reliably.
Running a server for your friends means you are the one keeping the world alive - and you deserve to see everything that happens backstage. This release rebuilds how SpawnBox tracks its own work so nothing silently disappears, freezes, or fibs about its progress, and adds a hover card so you can check on any server without breaking stride.
Everything SpawnBox does is now visible
Backups, restores, imports, diagnostic reports - every long-running job is now a tracked operation in a new Operations tray. You can watch progress live, and finished operations stay in a history that survives restarting the app, so “did that backup actually run?” always has an answer.
Come back after dinner and a While you were away summary groups anything that finished - with an attention badge if something needs you. Routine automatic successes stay quiet on purpose, so the tray only speaks up when it has something worth saying.
When something does fail, the failure row is a place to act, not just bad news: Retry is right there when the operation can be safely retried, and Get Help opens a diagnostic report already pointed at the failure, so asking us for help takes seconds instead of a scavenger hunt.
Cancel anything, safely
Every one of those operations - backups, restores, imports, diagnostic reports - can now be cancelled mid-flight. Before you confirm, SpawnBox tells you plainly what cancelling means for your server and your world in that exact moment, because some phases are safe to stop and some deserve a warning. While a cancel is happening you see an honest “Cancelling…” state, and the result is recorded as Cancelled - never dressed up as a success or a failure.
Long diagnostic builds also got a “this is taking a while” notice with live per-server progress, so a slow build never reads as a hung one.
Glance at any server without clicking in
Hover over a server tab and a card appears: the server’s status and uptime, who is online right now - longest-connected players first, with their avatars - and when its latest backup happened. It is the dungeon master’s quick look over the table, no page switch required.
The tabs themselves got smarter too: the active tab shows its full name, background tabs truncate neatly, and server details quietly warm up in the background so the card is ready before you hover.
Progress bars that tell the truth
An import used to show a bar frozen at 0% for most of the job while the real work happened fine underneath - which read as “hung” and made people cancel perfectly good imports. Bars across SpawnBox now refuse to show a number unless a real number exists (you get an honest spinner and phase label instead), and progress updates arrive faster while an operation is in flight.
Your world comes first
Two safety fixes in the backup pipeline, both for narrow timing windows most people never hit: if a backup was interrupted at exactly the wrong moment, your server could be left with world-saving switched off - it is now always switched back on, no matter how the backup ends. And a backup requested while a restore is running now queues politely behind the restore instead of getting lost. Restores themselves are now first-class operations with strictly defined phases, so the cancel logic knows exactly which moments are safe.
Smoother setup and updates
A fresh install could previously hit a state where setup never finished - the pieces SpawnBox was waiting for had gone to sleep before the wizard could see they were done. Setup now keeps everything awake until it is genuinely complete, and machines that finished setup sleep exactly like before. In the same family: starting a server after SpawnBox has idled everything to save memory now wakes things reliably on the first try, and the app updater got a hardened rollback path so a bad update heals itself cleanly.
The small stuff that matters
Import name-collision errors are now announced to screen readers. A confusing error message that implied a restart would fix a broken server-environment registration now tells you the truth about what will. And a round of under-the-hood security hardening makes tampering with SpawnBox’s own files harder and louder.