to the one person who has tried joining my minecraft server on my top-secret vps and promptly crashed it: i'm sorry this wasn't your fault
remember that screenshot of overworld chunks in the nether? guess what. that's also from this server
quick rundown of what happened: i took a world download of a world with a chunk border, essentially the middle area was different than everything outside of it. almost like an island on an ocean. however, the world download did not save the seed and instead generated new chunks all around the place which i realized a bit late, hence the 3/4-chunk wide holes. but there's new terrain now so yay