Set Target Neighborhood
In older versions of Bee, neighborhood assignment was random by default. However, we can maximize a node's chances of winning xBZZ and also strengthen the resiliency of the network by strategically assigning neighborhoods to new nodes (see the staking section for more details).
Therefore the default Bee configuration now includes the neighborhood-suggester option, which is set by default to use the Swarmscan neighborhood suggester (https://api.swarmscan.io/v1/network/neighborhoods/suggestion). You can use an alternative suggester URL, but it must return a JSON response in the following format: {"neighborhood":"101000110101"}. However, we currently recommend using only the default suggester.
The Swarmscan neighborhood selector prioritizes the least populated neighborhood. If a neighborhood contains imbalanced sub-neighborhoods, it will suggest the least populated sub-neighborhood instead. Furthermore, the suggester will temporarily de-prioritize previously suggested neighborhoods based on the assumption that a new node is being created in each suggested neighborhood so that multiple nodes do not simultaneously attempt to join the same neighborhood.
Setting Neighborhood Manually
It's recommended to use the default neighborhood-suggester configuration for choosing your node's neighborhood, however you may also set your node's neighborhood manually using the target-neighborhood option.
To use this option, it's first necessary to identify potential target neighborhoods. You can find underpopulated neighborhoods using the Swarmscan website. It ranks neighborhoods from least to most populated and displays their leading binary bits. Simply copy the leading bits from one of the least populated neighborhoods (for example, 0010100001) and use it to set target-neighborhood. After doing so, an overlay address within that neighborhood will be generated when starting Bee for the first time.
## bee.yaml
target-neighborhood: "0010100001"
You can also use the Swarmscan API endpoint to programmatically retrieve a suggested neighborhood:
curl https://api.swarmscan.io/v1/network/neighborhoods/suggestion
A suggested neighborhood will be returned:
{"neighborhood":"1111110101"}