Some performance upgrades

[Astrologic]

Objects which fall onto the ground seem to EACH generate their own graphic / properties list.  

It would probably do wonders for performance if instead of hundreds of unseen graphics flooding the ground, there could be a mess pile graphic which could contain the list properties of the objects which had fallen onto that grid space.  That, or limit the graphics displayed to 3 or so, or perhaps the largest quantity item should be displayed.  I noticed that this game starts to get incredibly slow the more you dig (you dig a lot), and I really think a mess pile graphic (or multiple) would clean up the game's performance quite a bit. 

This is a wonderful game, but it heats up my laptop more than it's ever been, and yet the performance still degrades.  My laptop isn't the best thing on the market, but it should be able to handle this game no problem.  

I don't know how pathfinding is done in this game, but it might be worth while to store familiar routes.  If a character(s) has/have run to a destination multiple times, and nothing has changed, it should just follow the familiar path, without recalculating the same route over and over.  You could possibly do a new check any time a path is obstructed, or cleared, and store that as the new familiar path.  Then the pathfinding only has to calculate the way to the familiar path, and follow it, rather than calculating the entire path from 0 to 1.  That might be already what's happening, how could I know?  
I love this game, really I do, but I get frustrated by the fact that I have to pause the game just to move my view to a new location.  I'm not entirely sure why that's happening, but I imagine it's a graphical thing.  It might be good to start multi-threading the render graphic process aside from the viewchange process.  It might come with a few graphical glitches here and there, all which would be momentary, but it'd make the gameplay a lot smoother.  

Also, I'm not entirely sure how the graphics work for this game either.  (I'm not about to tear it apart to find out)
But, I noticed when the battery moves, so does the meter which indicates it's charge.  This tells me that they might be part of the same graphic, which is probably highly inefficient.  I could be wrong on that.  I'd suggest having the batteries graphic separated from the charge meter, and perhaps using the same graphic for all meters (readjusted and resized).  That way, as meters are depleting, the graphics that are changing are minimal.  

Please also enable a low resolution mode.  I love the art style of this game, and it's beautiful and all, but some of those smaller details are completely useless unless you're fully zoomed in.  I mean, if the performance can be enhanced, I'd love to still play as the game is, but I'd opt for smooth gameplay over beautiful graphics any day.  
This game really needs some adjustment, I'm getting about 2 frames per second during mid-game.  1 frame every 3 seconds for late game, and I know I could just clean up the base by picking up the random debris, but maintaining a games performance should not be one of the management aspects of a game.
Anyway, keep up the great work.  Awesome game!

I'll try to keep my mind on the lookout for new things to suggest.  I don't know if they help, but I'm trying. xD

 

-UPDATE-

Something else I thought of.  Let's say you have dirt in a horizontal line, let's say 3 or 4 gridspaces wide.  Why not use just one graphic?  A big dirt pile?

Surely that'd help performance.