Hey @Envy-Machine,
thanks for suggesting this. I know that this is a struggle for players but you have to consider that the border also decreases server lag by a lot.
So how is this possible?
A world border is not just a physical border which you cannot pass, it also allows us as admins to prerender the world within the border. This process takes a lot of CPU power but leads to a steady performance when it’s done. If we would not pre-render the world, the server would constantly lag a lot when people enter new areas that were not rendered up to this point as this would trigger world generation each time. In a singleplayer world where you are the only player, you won’t notice such at all mostly, but on a multiplayer server this means lag and timeouts for every player.
We are considering to increase the world size with the next update. Increasing the world size results in exponential growth of disk usage as well as (for the rendering process) over-average CPU usage. We will wait until the next update, because we might add in some mods which generate ores / items upon world generation, so these things will then directly spawn in the new areas.
Also keep in mind, the overworld is mostly there to build and explore, for farming you have got the farming world (LeFarm) which is regularly reset.
Best regards
Bent