postworldgen How to remove natural roads post-worldgen through savefile tinkering

[Adgycarp]

It turns out to be relatively easy to remove the naturally spawned roads on an existing save.
Whilst you can disable roads in worldgen settings, there isn't an easy way to delete them post Worldgen. They do not have a simple prefab name that you can just delete.
The reason this might be desired, sometimes you end up with a megabase world on which you hadn't considered disabling roads, and you're hating how it looks in base. Or you had imported your megabase from a public server such as moon[eu] or meow together.

People have been asking every once in a blue moon how to do that, so this topic will serve as a guide or documentation
(There have been proper answers from what i can find after 1 minute of searching, but they might be inaccurate after changes to the game through the years).

End of yap, da guide:

1. Make a back-up first. AdgyCarp is not liable for getting your world ruined if you haven't made a back-up first 🙃
2. Disable roads in world settings (this might be redundant, but it's better to be sure!)
3. Find your world folder. If needed, look up somewhere how to do that
4. Open Master\save\session\session
   note: In practice, in place of the word 'session' there will be a hexidecimal mess of numbers, such as '30F079DEBF8F3C35'
5. Disregard any folder and .meta file. Of all extension-less files, pick the one with the highest number(your current snapshot). It is recommend to delete all others, since rolling back will undo all your work. Example: '0000013220'
   don't overthink the number, it does not by definition match your daycount.
6. Open in your favourite text editor. Notepad will suffice.
   (to me this worked better than VS code, as the latter tried opening 2 megabytes of map data in one line of text, causing it to Pal, you're not looking so good)
7. Pay close attention, as the specifics may vary slightly: Use search, and type ",roads={" without the quotes. This is the table with the road info. Keep selecting contents until you hit the final closing bracket, closing off the table with road data. The end will be marked with } followed by a comma, and then the rest of the map data. Do not worry about the other stuff. See example 1.
   If done right, the selected part should have equal amounts of open and close brackets
8. Delete all contents found in step 6 until you're left with just "roads={}" again without quotes. The table is now empty, which is fine.
9. Inside the file, you may encounter <roads="default"> without the <>. Change it to <roads="never">. This may not be necessary, but will help to eliminate doubts, should anything go wrong.
10. Save the file, and start up your world to see if it worked.

If something goes awry, don't bother hesitate to ask. Me or someone else may be able to help out.

Example 1

(This is an exerpt)
9//3//f/9//3//f/9//3//f/9//3//f/9//3//f/9//3//f/9//38=",roads={{3,{-274.5,-296.3},{-316.7,-267.1},{-365,-265.9},{-405.7,-237.7},{-355.1,-233.6},{-316.7,-267.1}},{1,{113.7,142.7},{142.8,95.3},{178,46.2},{231.7,44.8},{218.1,-1.5},{193.5,-46.3},{147.2,-58.1},{158.9,-1.7},{178,46.2}},{1,{-587.8,-80.6},{-615.1,-37.9},{-642.2,6.6},{-675.1,44.9},{-727.9,27.2},{-783,11.5},{-827,29.5},{-865.8,2.3},{-858.8,-31.6},{-814.5,-31.6},{-842.9,-73.1}},[7]={1,{-613.4,211.3},{-589.9,180.6},{-619.5,135.4},{-659.3,98.3},{-694.6,131.8},{-716.6,157.6},{-735.8,172.8},{-784.6,173.1}},[14]={1,{543.5,213.8},{537.2,158.1},{516.5,116.6},{521.2,71.8}},[15]={1,{428.9,120.9},{425.7,84.5},{472.3,69.1},{521.2,71.8},{573.4,71.4},{629,76.1}},[16]={1,{97.3,-482.6},{97.8,-437.6},{76.4,-391.5},{68.5,-340.1},{76.9,-313.5},{49.8,-286.4},{87.8,-290.2}},[9]={1,{76.4,-146.1},{115.9,-110.1},{142.9,-137.6},{165.5,-126.7},{117.7,-92.7},{115.9,-110.1},{147.2,-58.1}},[5]={1,{-405.5,-202.9},{-405.7,-237.7},{-454.6,-221.2},{-490.7,-185.9},{-541.9,-171.7},{-576.1,-215.7},{-567.3,-261.9},{-524.6,-278.2},{-482.2,-264.6}},[10]={1,{736.3,-67.3},{746.5,-31.7},{777.4,-2.7},{747.9,28.4},{788.3,61.4}},[20]={1,{-232.3,-252},{-225.6,-288},{-174.6,-298.8},{-176.2,-353.5},{-174.1,-408.1},{-205.6,-442.7},{-252.1,-437.2},{-277.7,-400.3},{-281.1,-348.2},{-274.5,-296.3},{-225.6,-288}},[11]={1,{800.2,-114.5},{823.3,-87.8},{780.4,-73.3},{800.2,-114.5},{818.7,-159.7}},[12]={1,{29.7,-253.8},{21.6,-235.9},{53.9,-194.6},{76.4,-146.1},{29,-152.5},{-5.2,-189},{-29.2,-233.7},{-75.7,-257.2},{-127.9,-269.3},{-174.6,-298.8}},[18]={1,{732.1,183.8},{689.7,166.5},{660.6,112.6},{629,76.1},{636.7,117.7},{647.8,176.3},{677.5,209.5}}},height=499,world_tile_map={OCEAN_COAS

In the exerpt you can see clearly where the roads table starts and ends. The gibberish before and after is not important for this purpose.

Example image of the finished product: 

 

Edited February 5 by Adgycarp
small tweaks

[Kova_]

I think it can be removed entirely since in the scripts/gamelogic.lua  there is a nil check: 

local function DoInitGame(savedata, profile)
   -- code
   if savedata.map.roads then

But in my option the issue is in the engine.  They use the QuadTree.  Maybe spatial grid would do better in performance wise. 

[Adgycarp]

That'll be worth trying. to remove the existence of roads in the savedata entirely, or to replace the empty table with a nil.
I'll see how that pans out in practice, but it will probably have the same result 🙃

On 2/5/2026 at 11:33 AM, Kova_ said:

I think it can be removed entirely since in the scripts/gamelogic.lua  there is a nil check: 

Alternatively, it seems that a modding solution could be made, where you can toggle the roads loading into your world or not ..

Like some postinit script that would check your mod choices, and would tell gamelogic.lua to not load the roads from savedata.
or to manipulate the 'RoadManager:BeginRoad()' (if it wouldn't affect the planted roads).

Not sure if modding allows any script to be altered though, I reckon some scripts are essential and could not be modded.

On 2/5/2026 at 11:33 AM, Kova_ said:

But in my option the issue is in the engine.  They use the QuadTree.  Maybe spatial grid would do better in performance wise. 

It would be interesting if a developper would make a beta where players can try out these changes.

I do know you had already confirmed, through trial in an actual live server, that removing the natural roads had a positive impact on server performance (the cpu load mainly)

 

Edited February 6 by Adgycarp
typo

[Cliffford W.]

Are the roads really that demanding in the game ?