There’s a lot of talk about tools and burdens. So let’s nip this quick. First all the tools you need to be able to see impact is your own two eyeballs and common sense (or as one of my drill sergeants once said, “good sense, since its apparently not that common.”). Its pretty simple, build the crafting stations you need, build then in a structure that it fits in, get it tucked in nice and tight, and then just enough storage to keep what you need, discarding what you don’t.
Next is the burden of a server owner/admin. I’ve been both and sometimes at the same time, so this is from experience. Here’s what the responsibility is here. Reboot the server once in a while. You can do this whenever its needed (differs server to server), or you can automate it. In either case you sometimes have to reboot it inbetween scheduled restarts for whatever reason. They could probably use a little improvement here. But I’m not sure how to do this. There isn’t any way to monitor the server playability (for most times) without logging in. Its not feasible for a server admin to login to 500 servers a day. It would literally take all day and you’d have to start again right as you finish and even then there’s still a chance a server halfway through will go glippy in that rotation. So they have to rely on player reports. I personally use Discord for that. They use Zendesk to cover the 1,000-1,200 players and 500 servers they have. They’re probably using the best tool there for that.
They also need to update the server when updates happen. Well I would wager FC is about the best when it comes to updating the servers when the game updates being as they are responsible for both. Their servers get the updates as they happen. They are about 5-10 minutes quicker on this than I am on average.
Finally you have rule enforcement. They make rules and they enforce them. Ideally a server owner will make rules and will enforce (or have admins help them enforce) them by a specific standard. This can vary server to server. Both in what the rules are, and how they are enforced (if using similar rules). Now here is where the misunderstanding is.
The rules govern what sort of players and playstyles you have on the server. They should only really be seen as guidelines when determining what server you wish to play on. You all shouldn’t be playing on these servers going “how close to the standard are we allowed to get?”
This is why you don’t have hard tools, hard limits, and silly features that disable building automatically after a certain point. There’s no need for that. As I said before, if you build the minimum that you need to play the game. You will be far under any standard being assessed. No one has gotten banned for building too much when building the minimum needed stuff to play. Umbrols was pretty clear about this in two seperate threads that the officials are pretty much meant for casual play and minimum building. There’s thousands of servers for other types of play if you all should desire to play in a manner that requires more than that.
But if you all are still not understanding. Go to singleplayer, enable admin mode, spawn in all the crafting stations. Tetris them up and then measure it in foundations. Now compare that to your build. If your build is more than 2x that, then you may want to reduce. Sooner than later. If you’re reading this, then ignorance cannot be claimed. If you get hemmed up by adverse action or a devwipe, then it was because of a decision you made, not ignorance or misunderstanding. Hence why this sort of thing is the responsibility of the player. This paragraph literally has all the information you need to be in compliance considering build size and impact on server performance.
