Dropped to 30-35 FPS on fine PC with only 1 map discovered (classic size), no ranches

[Ellilea]

Hey guys,

I have an FPS issue that's rearing it's ugly head and I can already see the game will become entirely unplayable if I continue going 😕 

I have been playing very organically and slowly, I don't even have any complex liquid/gas systems going yet. I haven't even built a rocket, or started ranching anything but like 4 rhexes and 4 lumbs, more or less. Got a couple of pufts/slickers running wild in the base, some dig sites, nothing outrageous. The map is 90% or so uncovered.

I wanted to go for an all-achievements run which means all planets, a bunch of ranches for critter achievement, etc. but being already at 30-35 FPS makes it not only less fun because everything's going slowly, but also worrisome, because it sure will get worse and soon.

I'd like to ask what can be done - and I certainly hope the answer isn't still "build tiles in all the empty spaces and avoid ranching any critters" because that's not really playing the game, is it?

My specs (is any of this a bottleneck?):

11th Gen Intel i5-11600KF @3.9 GHz

Ram 16 GB

GPU NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 ti (12 GB)

Installed on an SSD

I'll be grateful for any help/advice that doesn't turn the game into constant FPS management instead of colony management. Been there, done that, lost joy from playing every time because of it  

 

EDIT: I added the awesome "Fast Track" mod but while it fixed the FPS on speed 1, on speed 3 it's still only going up to 40. From the readme it seems it probably fixed some calculations that were already failing in my game but for that didn't allow a bigger FPS improvement (which likely means I'm still on my merry way to a quick FPS death, even if a little delayed...)
 

 

Edited July 17, 2025 by Ellilea

[blakemw]

I don't think the CPU should be much of a bottleneck.

Memory possibly is. I did something dumb with my memory (mismatched sticks) and once I remedied it ONI ran like twice as fast. So not the amount of memory 16 GB is fine, but the whole memory system. Not saying there's anything wrong, but it's definitely possible to have a factor of two difference between doing everything wrong and doing everything right.

Now, it is definitely possible that the game is doing something dumb. Recently I've encountered two situations: one the game dropped to like 2 fps because a dupe couldn't reach the thing they desperately wanted to reach. Another time was a large FPS drop caused by some building, might have been the blastshot maker? I don't remember any more the details of either case unfortunately but I'm pretty sure both cases were after PPP was released.

There's definitely no need to avoid ranching critters, build tiles in empty space, or consolidate debris. I'm pretty sure with your CPU no special effort should be required to get good fps playing Spaced Out normally. Like in the game I'm playing right now I get about 70 fps at cycle 200, with 11 dupes and lots of critters (with Fast Track), and making zero in-game FPS optimizations, and I have a similar CPU.

Edited July 17, 2025 by blakemw

[Ellilea]

I've Sandbox-destroyed my entire base, killed off 17 out of 20 dupes, most of the critters, blocked off top and bottom of the map with neutronium, and reached 90 FPS on speed 3. I was doing it bit-by-bit to see if any area causes a jump in particular, but sadly no It was just a gradual improvement...

For other tests

- I turned off all the mods (I don't have many and they're all small, mostly QOL [pip overlay, big storage - this one should help with performance too afaik etc.] or visual [decor pack 1, true tiles], no overhauls, no big packages) and it only resulted in about 2 FPS gain (if even - it does fluctuate).

- I made a schedule where entire colony just went to sleep for a long time and it didn't give a single FPS - doesn't seem to be any kind of bugged job or priorities (I have mostly limited priorities anyway with specialized dupes)

 

Eh.

Edited July 17, 2025 by Ellilea

[blakemw]

I remember there are also power/process management things that can cause heavy fps penalties, this can happen with both CPU and GPU (even if it makes no logical sense), I had an experience where I massively lose fps because my CPU wasn't set to performance (pinning the process to a single core also resolved this issue, I think the OS was shuffling the process between cores). Also I remember reading a thread, I think it might have been in bug reports on the klei forums, about some nvidia (I think) settings that resolved performance issues. These issues can come from a lack of "assertiveness" that ONI has towards claiming system resources and the OS thinks ONI isn't important. People have also experienced issues with overlays.

[SGT_Imalas]

have you tried fast track?

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/138444-beta-fast-track-performance-mod-for-oxygen-not-included/

"build tiles in all the empty spaces" is also bad for your saving times, its far better to seal off areas from dupe pathing and vacuum them.

generally dupe pathing is usually the main culprit for performance issues, you can optimize for that by making map sections physically inaccessible (locked doors, remove ladders) and by collecting all debris in a single tile (each dupe pathfinds to every reachable piece of debris every rendered frame to evaluate it for carrying tasks, collecting the debris reduces the number of items by merging them into 25T stacks)

Edited July 17, 2025 by SGT_Imalas

[Tigin]

I've come to embrace the lag. it doesn't take much for my 9980X3D to be reduced down to its 8 FPS slug fest (I also run a single moonlet-sized asteroid with no other asteroids)

[Gurgel]

Do you have a lot of debris laying around? Thermal calculations may be a factor. 

I used to make compactor farms to fix this, but these days I just drop everything onto one insulated tile with an automatic dispenser set to "sweep only". 

With 12 dupe "classic start" at 10k cycles, tons of critters, but no colonies (yet), I get around 60 FPS (i.e. at cap) with a 7800x3D and 32GB RAM while running 3x speed. 

[blakemw]

On 7/18/2025 at 3:10 AM, Tigin said:

I've come to embrace the lag. it doesn't take much for my 9980X3D to be reduced down to its 8 FPS slug fest (I also run a single moonlet-sized asteroid with no other asteroids)

Alright, I'm sure there's some hyperbole here, but what exactly is "doesn't take much"? Like my 12400F with mid DDR4 ram has no trouble maintaining 60-100 fps for "normal" ONI activities like doing enough to hit victory conditions. That's with Fast Track, which seems to be about a 30% improvement.

[Tigin]

1 hour ago, blakemw said:

Alright, I'm sure there's some hyperbole here, but what exactly is "doesn't take much"? Like my 12400F with mid DDR4 ram has no trouble maintaining 60-100 fps for "normal" ONI activities like doing enough to hit victory conditions. That's with Fast Track, which seems to be about a 30% improvement.

Come gander! (I actually got the same FPS with Fast Track and without, and thanks for giving me another opportunity to use Klei's Cloud Save Services)

Spaced In.sav

[Orzelek]

38 minutes ago, Tigin said:

Come gander! (I actually got the same FPS with Fast Track and without, and thanks for giving me another opportunity to use Klei's Cloud Save Services)

Spaced In.sav 118.4 MB · 0 downloads

Thats a whole asteroid base pretty much
It's really nice and it does kill fps - runs around 30 (no FastTrack) on my 9950X3D. Good test file for performance testing - it does seem to catch a freeze from time to time not sure why.

[SGT_Imalas]

2 hours ago, Orzelek said:

it does seem to catch a freeze from time to time not sure why.

potentially caused by the unity garbage collector

[arvenil]

This is so sad, I was literally looking at new hardware deciding what can I buy to run any game and reboot my ONI addiction, and you are telling me 9980X3D is not enough...

Could you guys at KLEI hire some AI to fix the engine? 

Edited July 28, 2025 by arvenil

[SGT_Imalas]

20 minutes ago, arvenil said:

This is so sad, I was literally looking at new hardware deciding what can I buy to run any game and reboot my ONI addiction, and you are telling me 9980X3D is not enough...

it is enough.

something in that system has some other things that impact performance

(9800X3D is better for gaming tho, 9980X3D is more of a workstation cpu)

Edited July 28, 2025 by SGT_Imalas

[blakemw]

17 hours ago, Tigin said:

Come gander! (I actually got the same FPS with Fast Track and without, and thanks for giving me another opportunity to use Klei's Cloud Save Services)

Hahah, Hyperbole confirmed, over 14,000 cycles.

I do wonder how well that map would perform if it was freshly remade the same but at like cycle 100, my feeling is just based on the amount of stuff, it shouldn't be as slow as it is.

FWIW I get about 25 fps on 1x speed, and around 10 fps on 3x speed (obviously how zoomed in you are and what you're looking at makes a difference).

12 hours ago, arvenil said:

This is so sad, I was literally looking at new hardware deciding what can I buy to run any game and reboot my ONI addiction, and you are telling me 9980X3D is not enough...

Could you guys at KLEI hire some AI to fix the engine? 

Realistically almost any recent CPU with good memory (not garbage tier) should handle ONI Spaced Out well enough to do normal victory condition things.

It's just standard sim-game fare that if there are no limits to how much you build, eventually the game can be bogged down. This is true even for Factorio which is exceptionally well optimized. Granted, it takes an awful lot of megabasing to bog down Factorio on a modern CPU, a bit easier in Space Age with spaceships, but where there's the will there's a way.

A while back there was the benchmark testing of Spaced Out thread, and that was a pretty decently large base and even what are today pretty basic CPUs like Ryzen 5 5600x were maxing it out and pretty much any 12th+ gen intel will max it out.

While people rave about the X3D cpus it's not totally clear they actually dramatically outperform other CPUs for ONI specifically, that's because there simply hasn't been comprehensive (or any) benchmarking and it's quite variable between game and even within the same game how much benefit there is. For example while some Factorio benchmarks show the X3Ds being speculator, others they aren't so amazing, for example I'll use this very large factorio base, for a simulation that bogs down many CPUs:

https://factoriobox.1au.us/results/cpus?map=9927606ff6aae3bb0943105e5738a05382d79f36f221ca8ef1c45ba72be8620b&vl=2.0.7&vh=

While the X3D CPUs are very high up, it's not by very much at all. And for instance there's not a lick of difference between the 5800X3D and 5800X, indicating the vaunted large cache on an X3D isn't doing anything once the simulation has become so bogged down (I'd speculate this is because it's get limited by overall memory bandwidth). In contrast, when the Factorio simulation is not bogged down, when the UPS numbers are easily 500 rather than merely around 60, in that case the 5800X3D gets about 50% more UPS than the 5800X - but it's not a meaningful gain because no-one cares if the UPS could be 280 or 450 for normal gameplay, which is limited to 60 anyway. This is not to say that something like a 9800X3D isn't a decent investment, just that it's unreasonable to expect dramatic performance improvements over much cheaper but still modern CPUs.

If ONI is getting memory bandwidth limited, which is not unlikely, then it's a rather difficult fix, involving fundamentally rearchitecture much of the game to minimize the size of data structures and streamline memory access. Suffice to say this isn't going to happen. On the bright side it's probably the case that an expensive system is not needed to basically max out ONI.

Edited July 29, 2025 by blakemw

[gigamoi]

17 hours ago, Tigin said:

Come gander!

Impressive! I get about 13-15 FPS. Takes 13GBs of memory to run when you let it play. Saving takes about 35 seconds and a full cycle (auto-save excluded) takes 4:25 minutes on my machine. I run a 9800X3D with more than enough RAM and a discrete GPU, and it saves on a NVME SSD.

 

Nice save you got here BTW. There is a bit of everything. I can sense all the insanity you crystalized in there.

How did you manage to add the demolior space POIs on an existing file? You have more than 1800 hours on record on this save and PPP's beta started less than 1400 hours ago at the time of writing.

[SGT_Imalas]

13 minutes ago, gigamoi said:

How did you manage to add the demolior space POIs on an existing file? You have more than 1800 hours on record on this save and PPP's beta started less than 1400 hours ago at the time of writing.

probably Starmap Shenanigans

[arty007]

Klei promised optimization right after the first DLC. But the cart is still where it was. They continue to feed us DLCs that are getting worse and worse. But even if I'm wrong, what's the point of this content - if you can't play it. As long as you praise them for the next skins - nothing will change. If the player brings money and does not criticize - then everything is fine. And here on the forum, criticism is generally prohibited, the glorious adepts of the studio will throw **** at anyone who even dares to express dissatisfaction.

[AlbertAartsen]

kind of norm of this game, like piping, pathing, shipping, all kind of this thing slow the game down. so after certain cycle this game will just run very slow

[Jann5s]

I was soooo hoping for spaced out to be parallelized between the astroids, but sadly no it's just one big segmented map. I guess it save a bit on pathing.

[gigamoi]

51 minutes ago, Jann5s said:

I was soooo hoping for spaced out to be parallelized between the astroids, but sadly no it's just one big segmented map. I guess it save a bit on pathing.

Me too but I can understand why it is not. Parallel programing can be VERY tough and is prone to very unfunny glitches when mistakes are done. Engine refactoring cost might also be very high.

[avc15]

moonlet starts are way friendlier for simulation complexity, at least they should be in theory? It takes a long time for me to reach frame death.

I'm on a 13600K and I don't choose classic at the start ... its omission at the beginning of spaced out seemed like a very deliberate choice.

Edited August 27, 2025 by avc15