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So, I have been playing this game for quite a while, so I have a decent idea about what impacts the game lag... But... Than I realized that I never actually tested some of my assumptions... If you are not interested in the experiments, feel free to skip to the end of the thread - the "takeaway section" For the start of the chain of the experiments... I prepared an almost empty map for myself. Than, for the first set of experiments. I made sure to turn this into a box with insulation tiles as the walls and filled the entire box with equally spread oxygen... My hope is that it will minimize any calculation for gas movement and heat exchange, so they do not interfere with the actual experiments. Experiment 1.0: Test: filling the entire map with ladders to maximize the possible amount of routes. But do not give duplicants access to those ladders. Expected result: game will work without lag, because the game does not actually get to calculate those paths. Result: No lags were observed. Experiment 1.1: make dupes mine something, but do not allow the access to ladders yet. Expected result: game will work without lag. Result: no lag observed. Experiment 1.2: Make a mining task that will give access to the ladders. Expected result: game will explode. Result: game almost explodes as soon as they mine a path to the ladders. There is major lag and even moving camera around in pause mode is hard. Experiment 1.3: have an access to the ladders through a closed door. Expected result: lag will be gone. Result: lag was gone as soon as I hit lock button on the doors. You can only imagine what kind of relief it was when you can move your camera again. * actually, I did not even hit the lock button in quick build mode. Most of lag was gone before the doors were actually locked by a dupes which is unexpected. Though, the game staggered quite a bit while the dupe was walking to the door to lock it, but way less than when the door was on other mode. Opening the door introduces lags as expected. **not giving a way out through the auto door works the same as just locking it... Clicking allow button on the permission to move right makes game lag harder and harder with each dupe allowed and less when a dupe is removed from permissions. Experiment 1.4: Lock dupes inside the minibox and add a few flying critters into the open space. Expected result: game will lag. Result: Suprisingly, the game only froze for a few second when unpaused, but did not lag afterwards. * adding many times more critters. I managed to achieve very minor lag of the game... Though. I observed another thing. At the start of the cycle and sometimes in the middle of it, the game would freeze... The number of critters would make the freeze longer. Thats 400 pufts in the open and it just causes period freezes for 5-10 seconds once or twice during a cycle. Getting rid from all the pufts, gets rid from any freezes. ** putting 400 pufts inside the confined space makes the game run smooth, though, I there was still a loading freeze at the start of the cycle. Closing and opening the door does not seem to have an impact on the game. I find it very interesting that the game calculates something for critters at the start of the cycle, but putting critters inside a closed room does not seem to ease those calculations. Accidental Experiment 1.5 Trying to save and restart this map. Result: game took quite a long time to load and when it loaded, you could not play for about a minute as it kept on loading. -------------------------------- ---------Takeaway---------- -------------------------------- Mostly, with this experiment, I have confirmed what I already knew. To cause less lag in your game: 1. Give your duplicants as little options in their paths as possible. Here is what will cause you lag more: If your base ever looks like that, make sure to fix it. Just having access to more options causes more lag. Also, on the side note. Every single time I added fire pole to my base, my base would start lagging, I do not even need to test for it. Here is what should cause less lag: 2. As a continuation of point 1, block your duplicants access to areas that they have no business visiting. 3. As continuations of point 2, confine your duplicants to their personal workspace. Only let miners have access outside your base. Make farmers sleep next to farms and make them never be able to leave the farms. Make ranchers sleep with the critters... Etc. 4. Use automation to lock down areas which duplicant will not visit during the specific time of day... For example: They have no business inside their bedrooms, mess halls, toilets, rec rooms, washrooms, etc during the time of day that is not a break time. So, use automatic to lock those away and open at specific time of day... This design uses 2 doors, one is open/closed by automation, the other is an one way door, to make sure that dupes do not consider going out after they went in and vice versa... (also, this a reason why narcoleptic sucks, they can easily fall asleep during the time you close/open the doors and be stuck where you do not want them to be.) I plan to do more lag tests, but I would like to hear what other people know and tried.

This is my next set of tests for how things impact the game. For this set of experiments, pipes will be the suspect... I dearly hope that there is no difference between water and gas pipes, because conducting same experiments for both types would be time consuming. Same as before, I will place "takeaway" section in the end. I was not sure when ever to post it within same topic and make it hard for people to find as they dig through comments or to create a new topic. Previous part Already during the building, I have experienced several issues. In fact, I managed to kill my game on the first attempt to build it. Which is surprising because there was no such issue with setting up ladders map. First of all, building large segments would become harder the larger the segment became, I would give up at segments with length of 1000. Secondly, building next segment starting at the end of previous one would become painfully slower and slower, this is how I killed the game on first attempt... Game handles placing segments of pipes and than connecting them much better than trying to continue building same pipe network. Also, I got a few glitched out areas during my building process: Also, the game experiences no issues in normal mode. Switching to pipes overview mode causes several major problems. First of all, moving camera becomes painfully slow and it depends on how close you are zoomed in which suggests that there is a major problem in game with the rendering of the pipe network. Also, I tried moving my camera in pipe mode in an area without pipes and it was smooth, but when I moved back to the pipes area, game crashed: Luckily, I made sure to save my game. The game took quite a while to load, but loaded without issues. Before attempting to run any tests with that piping network, I let the game run for a few cycles... It seems like having those pipes does not impact game performance. Though, for some weird reason, it did increase loading freeze during the new cycle start more than having 400 pufts did. Experiment 2: Run water through the entire pipe one way. Expected result: with how many setbacks I experienced during the construction of that machine, I can only expect game crashing. Result: Game Crashed within a few seconds of running after connecting the pipe network to the pump. So, to continue the experiment, I first attempted to load the same game (in hope that I do not need to build a smaller map with same setup) and disconnected about half of the pipes from the network, but did not delete them. Experiment 2. Attempt 2: Result:Game still crashed. For next attempt, still using same map, disconnected 3/4 of the pipes from the network. Experiment 2 Attempt 3: Result: Game crashed before I even started things running lol. I am led to believe that I have to setup a smaller experiment map D: While Setting up way smaller map, I got it to crash again >_> F6 overlay kills your games. I am going to attempt making the pipes on the smaller map for second time. Getting crashes one after another is discouraging me from doing any experiments (I crashed it again). My experiments might lose their validity after something that causes game to crash gets fixed. I am going to attempt with 2 times less pipes than I planned on smaller map. Well, at the very least, moving in F6 mode does not crash the game, but its painfully slow. I am surprised about how lucky I got with the bigger map when moving camera in pipe overlay. Before starting the experiment, I will let it run for a few cycles. There is a minor cycle start loading freeze. Experiment 2 Revised version: Expected result: hopefully it will work this time. Result:it did not crash... As long as I avoid F6 overview mode, the game seems to run smooth, but as soon as I enter it, the game lags really hard, hovering map over the pipe makes game lag even harder. It might be too small of a pipe to properly stress test for the lag, so I will still advice to build shorter pipes, but thinking logically about it, single input, single output should not be demanding to calculate. Also, I did not realize how many cycles would it take for the water to reach its destination Experiment 2.1: Now, lets make a "questionable" piping system and see how it runs... Questionable is the best way to describe it. Expected result: this is where the game will start to lag. Result:Well, first of all, even trying to build questionable network makes the game freeze, the more connection I added, the more it would take to load. In screenshot, it handle fine the first big segment than it took a bit to load after second segment... Third segment was small, but it took like 2 minutes to load... I gave up trying to wait for last segment as the game stayed frozen even after 20 minutes... So... I settled for less connection as shown in second screenshot. Still there were no lags. So, the game calculates the route for pipes at the moment of the construction and actually calculating the piping of liquids does not take much. To test this, I tried another setup on screenshot 3... I stopped adding more connections when it started giving small delay. Surprisingly, it caused no lag, but the game failed to make proper routes for the water as it ended up getting stack at random places Experiment 3: setup a system with multiple inlets and outputs separately. Expected result: perhaps the game will lag now? Result: the game did not lag, maybe, the map size is too small to stress test how much lag it caused... On the other hand, going to the pipe overview crashed the game --------------------------------------- -----------Takeaway--------------- --------------------------------------- 1. Do not go into pipe overview mode when you do not have to and if you have to, make sure to zoom in first and do not zoom out in pipe overview. 2. Build your pipes systems as short as possible. 3. Try to not build systems that use pipes close to one another. 4. When building a network of pipes, build segments of pipes first and than connect them together. Do not try to just extend pipe system that you already have, instead, build the extension first and than connect it. With how much the game actually crashes, it feels impossible to setup a proper stress test pipes for lag. But, common sense tells me that you should not build mazes with your pipes and try to use bridges to simplify the flow of gasses and liquids. Also, having a lot of pipes might be even worse than having a lot of critters.