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With a delta engine, and local map generation per chunk, you can decrease the server load.

I dont know how minetest stores its map. Does it already use on-the-fly map (re)generation plus delta store in the database backend ?

Because if the map is stored as a simple X,Y,Z array of chunks, right from the start, thats not going to be efficient...

Somethin about the map formatting:

https://github.com/celeron55/minetest/blob/master/doc/mapformat.txt

Hmm... I've also been thinking about this.
Also, use a locally-installed mod if the same mod version is used in the server. Perhaps using some hash to check consistency.