Why does this game lag with relatively low entities quantity loaded?

[WendyHater9000]

Context:

I've played in public server a lots, and love to use Wurt because this character don't require low ping. But when my merm guardians reach around 30~40 while there's like 7~8 players, the host become red and the game lag to 1 frame per second

But the game I've played like ark/minecraft/valheim don't really lag this much while there's more than 30 entities loaded(like I got 120 penguins exist while doing organic polymer farm) .

Is it because of game engine or what? I hope Wurt and Webber can be played freely without getting server killed 

[Guille6785]

because it's optimized like garbage, next question

[gaymime]

this game does not use polygonal entities and instead has flat entities composed of many individual parts layered together. a single merm contains i think 7-8 parts so 30 merms is something like 200 moving pieces on top of the several thousand other pieces of things that compose the trees and bushes and water and players and enemies and loot and so-forth. a strong graphics card can handle this game beautifully but an older weaker one will struggle and lag. when i upgraded my card a couple years back i went from lagging and occasional stalls/crashes to only rarely ever seeing a slow-down

Edited July 21, 2025 by gaymime

[Bumber64]

15 minutes ago, gaymime said:

this game does not use polygonal entities and instead has flat entities composed of many individual parts layered together. a single merm contains i think 7-8 parts so 30 merms is something like 200 moving pieces on top of the several thousand other pieces [...]

Those shouldn't be difficult numbers for a GPU from this millennium. Could be an issue with shaders and lighting, perhaps.

Updating drivers can also solve certain issues.

Edited July 21, 2025 by Bumber64

[gaymime]

2 minutes ago, Bumber64 said:

Those shouldn't be difficult numbers for a GPU from this millennium. Could be an issue with shaders and lighting, perhaps.

not sure what to tell you. this is an issue with a lot of games that i have played over the years and was the issue i had with this game in particular. lots of lag when entities were on-screen > upgraded my card > lag almost entirely dissipated overnight

Edited July 21, 2025 by gaymime

[Bumber64]

1 minute ago, gaymime said:

not sure what to tell you. this is an issue with a lot of games that i have played over the years and was the issue i had with this game in particular. lots of lag when entities were on-screen > upgraded my card > lag almost entirely dissipated overnight

I'm using an Nvidia from ~2012 and never had any problems. The issue isn't just about specs.

Minecraft just fixed a number of issues that only occurred on specific Intel architectures, for example.

Edited July 21, 2025 by Bumber64

[WendyHater9000]

4 hours ago, Bumber64 said:

I'm using an Nvidia from ~2012 and never had any problems. The issue isn't just about specs.

Minecraft just fixed a number of issues that only occurred on specific Intel architectures, for example.

It's actually whole server lag, not graphic lag

[gaymime]

1 hour ago, kevindaze said:

It's actually whole server lag, not graphic lag

does it lag for the host too? if the host is also lagging it might be a specs iissue, if the host is fine it might be an internet issue, if the server is remote it could be the upload/download speed throttling

[WendyHater9000]

1 hour ago, gaymime said:

does it lag for the host too? if the host is also lagging it might be a specs iissue, if the host is fine it might be an internet issue, if the server is remote it could be the upload/download speed throttling

Host become red. Just go into klei server and play Webber plating like 15 spider den together and you’ll see

[Mike23Ua]

Probably because it’s running on a decade old outdated gaming engine.

Play a game like Block Quest Maker, it’s not “Too Much” Older than DST, but those 5-6 years can and do make a difference.

The one thing that “personally” disappoints me about DST though is that even though there is an option to host “Alone Mode” it still runs the game like it’s Online (Aka still using two shards for Surface & Caves unlike Solo DS which off-loads them when the player is Absent from one or the other)

id bet you 1000$ that DST would run a whole lot more smoothly and lag a whole lot less if at least in “Alone Mode” it offloaded shards like the single player game.

That said: I specifically brought up BQM for a reason, it features the Same sort of pre-skill tree Combat of DS/DST where you hit a monster a few times, Dodge backwards to avoid it’s one slow attack, hit a few more times rinse repeat.

[Captain_Rage]

The devs wrote on more than one occasion that DST uses Lua extensively and that decision was made with ease-of-use and modding in mind. As for network and general performance that decision probably took a toll. I am no computer scientist but this is from my understanding.

[Edible Coal]

22 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

Probably because it’s running on a decade old outdated gaming engine.

Play a game like Block Quest Maker, it’s not “Too Much” Older than DST, but those 5-6 years can and do make a difference.

The one thing that “personally” disappoints me about DST though is that even though there is an option to host “Alone Mode” it still runs the game like it’s Online (Aka still using two shards for Surface & Caves unlike Solo DS which off-loads them when the player is Absent from one or the other)

id bet you 1000$ that DST would run a whole lot more smoothly and lag a whole lot less if at least in “Alone Mode” it offloaded shards like the single player game.

That said: I specifically brought up BQM for a reason, it features the Same sort of pre-skill tree Combat of DS/DST where you hit a monster a few times, Dodge backwards to avoid it’s one slow attack, hit a few more times rinse repeat.

it would cause desync issues

[Hungry French]

On 7/21/2025 at 7:28 AM, Bumber64 said:

Those shouldn't be difficult numbers for a GPU from this millennium. Could be an issue with shaders and lighting, perhaps.

Updating drivers can also solve certain issues.

DST uses the most primitive shaders and lighting.

[Veyred]

since ppl keep on saying performance will kill itself with too many spiders:

I planted 40 Tier 3 spidernests and made them fight, on a modern pc this causes no performance issues, however having a lot of entities around seems to eat up ram.

I believe the performance issues stem from the host or server running out of or low on ram.

Spoiler

 

[xhyom]

On 7/22/2025 at 5:55 AM, Captain_Rage said:

The devs wrote on more than one occasion that DST uses Lua extensively and that decision was made with ease-of-use and modding in mind. As for network and general performance that decision probably took a toll. I am no computer scientist but this is from my understanding.

I think it's definitely a problem caused by using Lua, Roblox also uses it. I think like 100% ingame is in Lua, and it has exactly the same problem, even with the infinite budget they have

[Bumber64]

On 7/21/2025 at 6:41 AM, Mike23Ua said:

Probably because it’s running on a decade old outdated gaming engine.

Java Minecraft is older than a decade. They got all the issues sorted a while after multiplayer was added and there's been no problems since.

On 7/21/2025 at 6:41 AM, Mike23Ua said:

id bet you 1000$ that DST would run a whole lot more smoothly and lag a whole lot less if at least in “Alone Mode” it offloaded shards like the single player game.

It also breaks nightmare/scrappy werepig.

[hoxi]

On 7/21/2025 at 12:57 AM, kevindaze said:

Is it because of game engine or what? I hope Wurt and Webber can be played freely without getting server killed 

It's mainly entity brains/behavior, straight up. Some of them are very, very badly unoptimized, Spiders being at the top of that (their food searching is very unoptimized and has a huge radius, so it's very, very expensive).

But in general, brains tend to update with very short intervals, with no measures to deal with having many, many brains of the same type active (like increasing the intervals a bit to not update as fast). Optimizing many of the brain files, doing a pass on brain and behavior node intervals, and potentially adding some sort of measure when updating way too many brains of the same type, could help a lot.

Another similar case is having many, many entities burning. If their fire can propagate, they update propagation on every tick, and they do entity searches on every update.

 

On 7/21/2025 at 1:04 AM, Guille6785 said:

because it's optimized like garbage, next question

Very contributing..

Most of the game is actually very optimized on the lua side (can't speak for the engine though). Some of the few exceptions to that is the stuff I mentioned above.

 

On 7/21/2025 at 1:14 AM, gaymime said:

this game does not use polygonal entities and instead has flat entities composed of many individual parts layered together. a single merm contains i think 7-8 parts so 30 merms is something like 200 moving pieces on top of the several thousand other pieces of things that compose the trees and bushes and water and players and enemies and loot and so-forth. a strong graphics card can handle this game beautifully but an older weaker one will struggle and lag. when i upgraded my card a couple years back i went from lagging and occasional stalls/crashes to only rarely ever seeing a slow-down

Pretty sure a lot of this is irrelevant (or not as much) on dedicated servers (which is what you get when you host a game with caves), as there's no rendering on that server instance (or at least, there shouldn't be). That would hold more ground with client-hosted servers which aren't common as they're a single shard, DSA aside.