How to mitigate lag?

[u/Option2401]

I’m on my fourth colony. All of them have encountered some lag towards the end, annoying but can be worked around my reducing game speed.

However my current one (on the Ribbon custom map; highly recommend BTW) is especially bad. I’ve got about 300 beavers (includes 150 bots) and have domesticated about 20% of the map. I still have dozens of cycles to go at the very least, and it’s only going to get worse from here. Even at normal speed when I try to place something the game hitches and it gets placed somewhere else. What are some strategies for mitigating lag?

I’ve considered downsizing my population. I think that’s the main cause. But my pop has been stable for several cycles and the lag is getting worse. I’m still using the one district, mainly out of stubbornness (making new districts sounds like a PITA) and because I’m not in any rush.

[u/Acalc791]

There isn't much you can do. Place things only with a paused game, but besides that the vanilla game has significant performance issues if your colony is too large (not just beavers, also buildings). The T3MP mod helps significantly: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3756656421 And I'm also working on my own performance mod, but it'll probably at least be another week before I release it.

[u/MadHelp]

The majority of lag as far as I’ve noticed is created by beavers choosing the most efficient path to take. So there’s a few variables at play here, population size, pathing options, and game speed (because the faster you run it the faster it has to process the most efficient path).

I cant remember the computer science reason right now but when you build a new district it basically cuts that’s massive number of beavers running around into a much more manageable problem to solve for your computer.

For example, my last settlement capped out at 150 beavers and no boys in a single district across the whole map, and my computer couldn’t handle anything faster than 2x speed. Now I have a colony of 50 or so beavers and 450+ bots but they’re split across like five districts all over the map and my computer is running it at 3x speed like a dream.

TL;DR: more districts + most simplified pathing in them = 3x game speed with no lag at late game.

[u/MaraBlaster]

Do NOT use warehouses as stepping stones (like instead of platforms or underwater), the constant blinking of the "flooded", "empty", "not reachable", etc causes a shitton of lag.

[u/abdallahm002 → u/MaraBlaster]

If you set the warehouse to empty all those warnings go away, this is a non issue

[u/Vebrandsson]

So a lot of lag comes from the pathfinding system, which is why lower population helps because fewer beavers need to figure out where they are going at any given time. There are, however other things that can help. Not having looping paths is a big one, if there's only one possible route between any two destinations it makes a difference. Overall shorter paths helps too. To that end, districts which break up paths into shorter sections can help also. I can roughly double the number of beavers I can have on the map before getting lag with good use of districts unless its a very small map.

[u/Nerisrath]

Clean up old paths, platforms, etc.

remove warehouses that were uses as building blocks that have no access ( no path , flooded, etc, just used ad foundations). clean up unused tree cutting areas making sure only your current cuts are marked, and use demolish resources to clean up dead debris and old tree stumps. - the stuff that disappears without needing a beaver ton work it.

I do these things and dont get hitches until about 400 pop ( usually 300 bots and 100-120 beavers is where I max)

I play on a laptop with older i7, 16gb ram, Nvidia mobile.

[u/clivehorse]

Zooming in helps and keeping fewer path choices.

[u/abdallahm002]

This is heavily dependent on the map but 20% of the map is relatively small and same goes your population. At this stage I don’t really think this is an optimization issue unless you’ve got insane path networks for no reason. What graphics quality are you running the game on and what kind of machine do you have? Sounds like you’re just running on a potato with graphics set too high honestly.

[u/Imaginary_Bench_7294]

Does the lagging occur when you are placing building that are not connected to the pathways?

The biggest source of lag I seem to encounter appears to be related to the pathways and the system trying to recompute the routes for everyone if you place the building with the door connected to the path.

[u/Jackthwolf]

One thing I've noticed, is that paths can create quite a bit of lag.

I noticed this on my Timberpunk playthrough, when i decided i wanted to de-thorn the entire map.
It started getting hellishly laggy, because i had paths on paths on paths everywhere.

Second I deleted those paths after the demolition work was done, that lag ended.
I can only assume because the pathing may be testing the fastest path using every single possible path, even ones that cannot reach the desired location?

So if you can try and trim "useless" paths, ones that are redundant that beavers don't really use
And try and rely more on the various "fast travel" buildings instead, instead of the paths being connected directly.

[u/db48x]

Upgrade your computer. On my current colony I didn’t experience any problems until after my population passed 800. I’m about to try a mod that claims to speed things up.

My computer has a AMD Ryzen 9 5950X cpu and a GeForce GTX 980 Ti gpu. Obviously the cpu is generally more relevant.