Lag.

[RexySeven]

I know it's not original but it's true the lag is obnoxious.
Alright, but serious, is there gonna be any work done on adressing the issue of shards\save lag, like ever? Is that even planned in future? 

I know it's le funny moment getting hit by hound twenty meters away even in single player but the amount of desinc happening is simply ridicilous. 
You are given only two choices in-game to combat this: smooth movement but with crazy amount of desinc or torelable desinc but controling your character feels like he's always on ice skates (you also still get hit twenty meters away occasionally). 

I'm wondering if it's too late or there's simply too much work have to be made on optimization/possible work arounds for shard system? 
Yes, I know about that addon, but I feel like, isn't it a bit weird to rely on third party addon to have game actually function like it supposed to?

I'd honestly take entire yearly update slot just for devs to find a possible solution to this problem if there's even any. 

[Frashaw27]

It's not possible unless you want to remove the possibility of the two shards existing at the same time meaning you're in/out of the caves/surface if one player does/doesn't want to go into/out of them. It's not the best system but any other solution detracts from the freedom of the game itself. I'm not even sure if it would be fixed even with a whole code refactor.

[Well-met]

years of not doing anything about it probably means its set up deep into the engine and never getting changed.

[Edible Coal]

8 hours ago, RexySeven said:

I know it's le funny moment getting hit by hound twenty meters away even in single player but the amount of desinc happening is simply ridicilous. 
You are given only two choices in-game to combat this: smooth movement but with crazy amount of desinc or torelable desinc but controling your character feels like he's always on ice skates (you also still get hit twenty meters away occasionally). 
 

i never experience lag that bad before, you should probably pick closer servers, my average server have 32 ms ping and i seriously cant see obvious lag

[Well-met]

once again, the eternal confusion between input lag, hardware lag and videogame internet lag.

[Mayson71]

Well, Don't Starve Alone exist, so...

[Bumber64]

I've never experienced the singleplayer lag that drives people to use DSA, and my computer isn't great. If it's a specific hardware issue, then that's harder for Klei to fix.

Edited July 13, 2025 by Bumber64

[RexySeven]

5 hours ago, Edible Coal said:

i never experience lag that bad before, you should probably pick closer servers, my average server have 32 ms ping and i seriously cant see obvious lag

I was over exaggerating but I hope you get the idea. The lag in singleplayer worlds is still there. 

2 hours ago, Mayson71 said:

Well, Don't Starve Alone exist, so...

I mentioned it. 

5 hours ago, Well-met said:

years of not doing anything about it probably means its set up deep into the engine and never getting changed.

Unfortunately it might be the case. 

[cropo]

4 hours ago, Bumber64 said:

I've never experienced the singleplayer lag that drives people to use DSA, and my computer isn't great. If it's a specific hardware issue, then that's harder for Klei to fix.

Which is weird to me because I've played Singleplayer Don't Starve and I know exactly how smooth it feels, compared to even playing offline in DST. The difference is night and day to me, so insanely different that I can comfortably use a controller in singleplayer and feel like I'm getting a better experience(aside from lazy explorer, but there's barely any need to use that in Singleplayer other than immundius shootious).

I don't understand internet lingo too much so I could be totally wrong with what I'm about to say but whenever I play MMO's there were two terms that often came up. Client-sided and server-sided. 

For example, a MMO I played called Latale was server-sided. This meant that, when you move, the character on screen doesn't move until the server gets your input. If you lived right next to the server, there was no input lag at all and you could freely move and dodge.

Client sided is a game like Maplestory(except for some things like picking up loot) where if you move, you move and then your game tells the server you moved. This lets players with incredibly high-ping dodge boss attacks, because the boss attack respects your client-sided movements, even if this translates to whacky movements on-screen for the other players. 

DST feels similar to Latale, a server-sided game. I have no idea if I am describing this right or not, but would it be possible to opt-in to make the enemy attacks Client-sided, as well as the players movements? It would make characters teleport around and look janky in multiplayer servers, but some players would be willing to make that sacrifice especially on single-player worlds. Probably would need to disable it on official Klei servers because it would probably make cheating easier as well, but it would be a huge help to singleplayer worlds or even duo worlds with irl friends.

[Maxil20]

10 hours ago, RexySeven said:

I was over exaggerating but I hope you get the idea. The lag in singleplayer worlds is still there.

This is because DST has a very, very low default tick rate.

To give context, Tick rate is a measure used by the server to process game actions such as movement and the like. Terraria runs at 60 per second, and Minecraft (which already has some complaints of a similar scope) goes at 20 per second. DST, by default, goes at 15 per second. This is different from your client's Framerate (which goes at 60), and is important because hosting a dedicated server forces you to be a client of said server (this isn't unusual, for the record several games do this).
There is a good chance inputs will be eaten for 3-4 frames of game time (or around 0.066 seconds), which is noticeable as you can likely tell, and makes the game feel clunky without lag comp (which I prefer to run, as I would rather know where the server sees my character at then having a facade of where they actually are).

I really don't like this, and as a result run an admin command/launch option to force the tick rate to be set to 60 on my own hosted servers. The problem with this is DST is not meant to go above 15, and results in some issues like your character ever so slightly jiggiling when moving around which can be bothering, but in turn results in your movements feeling much snappier with ~1 frame of delay at most, which is far more important for my case, and doesn't seem to break practically anything else in my thousands of hours of running this.

Do note that there are some server performance overhead issues when upping the tick rate which can get dicey if you have many players on at once, but if you are only playing with 1-3 players then you should be fine

If you would like to try it, you can input the following command into the properties -> launch options section of Steam (if it isn't your style, simply deleting the line will revert it) 

-tick_rate 60

Edited July 13, 2025 by Maxil20
Disclaimer for server overhead

[lowercase skye]

10 hours ago, Maxil20 said:

-tick_rate 60

To my knowledge, this just marginally improves precision of inputs while adding a lot of unnecessary stress onto your CPU and network. The below thread is a tad aggressive about it but explains better:

[hoxi]

On 7/12/2025 at 11:20 PM, Well-met said:

years of not doing anything about it probably means its set up deep into the engine and never getting changed.

It's not really an engine thing, and things outside of the engine can be done to improve things.

 

On 7/13/2025 at 2:50 AM, Mayson71 said:

Well, Don't Starve Alone exist, so...

Don't Starve Alone doesn't solve the issues of latency in multiplayer games, and it can come with some issues and limitations due to not having all shards being online at the same time for properly communicating things (even if accounted for vanilla, other mods exist, and it might cause conflicts).

 

 

Also this is gonna be a bit long but, I'll go ahead anyway:

 

On 7/13/2025 at 7:37 AM, cropo said:

For example, a MMO I played called Latale was server-sided. This meant that, when you move, the character on screen doesn't move until the server gets your input. If you lived right next to the server, there was no input lag at all and you could freely move and dodge.

This is pretty much how DST works, yeah.

With movement prediction disabled, your input reaches the server, the server processes things, and then you see your character move according to the server like any other entity, when the engine syncs your position and "motor velocity" changing.

There is some built-in "prediction" of sorts with motor velocity (or at the very least it's just synced to clients and they also simulate it locally), which is what mainly gets used to move entities around and makes a lot of movement look smooth. A specific example would be items getting launched around, or just about most entities walking in a direction, both look smooth, while in contrast, monkey cursed trinkets move by setting their position instead when homing onto nearby players, so they look very jittery in comparison.

With movement prediction enabled, it's similar, but there's some differences in how the server handles things (and of course, on your client, you immediately start moving on pressing inputs).

 

On 7/13/2025 at 7:37 AM, cropo said:

Client sided is a game like Maplestory(except for some things like picking up loot) where if you move, you move and then your game tells the server you moved. This lets players with incredibly high-ping dodge boss attacks, because the boss attack respects your client-sided movements, even if this translates to whacky movements on-screen for the other players. 

Client authority is different from game to game, if existent at all. A lot of the time, all that's done is client prediction, sometimes nicely, sometimes badly, sometimes not at all.

Sometimes there's also lag compensation (this game calls the setting for movement prediction that but, it's not accurate, as that's not compensating for lag on the server in any way). It's usually something to delay timing on some things (like when to land a hit) or predict certain actions so they work better for clients, while retaining server authority.

Both lag compensation and client authority for combat are not a thing in DST, at all.

There is a bit of client authority for starting actions when prediction is enabled, if you're on console, or otherwise if you're the server owner, an admin, or a friend of the owner, but this causes some mismatching that can result in things like being able to hit a Terrorbeak and back out without prediction enabled, but usually being unable to do so with it enabled (and the timing being off when compared). But there's nothing of the like done for combat, if you get hit on the server, that's it, there's nothing to give leniency to remote players.

 

On 7/13/2025 at 7:37 AM, cropo said:

I have no idea if I am describing this right or not, but would it be possible to opt-in to make the enemy attacks Client-sided, as well as the players movements? It would make characters teleport around and look janky in multiplayer servers, but some players would be willing to make that sacrifice especially on single-player worlds. Probably would need to disable it on official Klei servers because it would probably make cheating easier as well, but it would be a huge help to singleplayer worlds or even duo worlds with irl friends.

Yes, ideally, the game would allow servers to choose how to handle something like client authority, so that in public servers, people don't get to abuse the system (it is extremely easy to do, especially if the game can be modded as much as DST allows, so yes, you wouldn't want this on public servers both from Klei and random people, and you'd curate who's allowed or not, or have a setting to enable it for everyone).

Lag compensation should always be a thing though, only ignored when client authority is used because that will handle things instead.

PvP stuff would of course ignore client authority, but that'd be easy to filter out (yes I know it's mostly irrelevant, but it's still there and needs to be accounted). But given this is mainly a PvE coop game (that many people also play on their own), having lag compensation, and client authority for private games, would make the game much less frustrating to play by easing or outright removing lag out of the equation.

 

All this said, both of these things require a lot of work, especially due to needing to integrate it onto the existing code, there's many specific attacks in the game that need specific handling, they're not just a range change, and sometimes some pseudo rollback mechanics will be needed for client authority, as some attacks check immediately upon landing a hit or so to run some logic (an example would be the Nightmare/Scrappy Werepig combo-ing attacks, you have to account for receiving a response from a client both quickly or slowly). All that said, it's not impossible, and it's not an engine thing.

 

Not to like, come across as bragging, given what I said above (especially when I stopped working on it for like a year now..), but for a while now, I've been working on a mod that adds combat client authority. It's pretty much in a working state for most things in the game, just not some bosses and some enemies with unique attacks, as those take the longest and most polishing. But I need to do some cleanup and update things a bit more before I feel more comfortable about publishing it.

It's not simple, and I'm sure it could be done better, but at least I did manage to make the game consistently playable for friends who live in different continents because getting hit depends on what they see on their screen for most things, and has made those private sessions with friends more fun for everyone rather than just the host player. I'd really want this to be a base game feature though.. so many people get understandably frustrated by it.