So until they do a performance pass on the game, I need to complete the town progression quest as quickly as possible before my game gets too laggy for me to play the town anymore. (Even if I don’t take on more hearthlings.) As a result I have yet to reach the quest to even get the chance to make the fountain, I keep getting stuck on the hearth quest… I tend to take games at a stroll rather than a run. So what do you guys do to complete the quest quickly, and in how many days does it take on average for you guys to get to tier 3?
I can’t say much about the specific quest requirements since I haven’t had a chance to explore them yet, but some general efficiency/time-saving and performance saving tips:
The first and the biggest is to save and reboot the game every hour or less, particularly with unstable versions. There are some tasks which stack up as “junk” and don’t get cleared until the game closes, so regular breaks are good for your computer as well as for you.
Secondly, and in a similar vein, it’s better to break tasks down into small chunks wherever you can rather than leaving big tasks with lots and lots of decisions for the computer to work through “in one go.” For example if you want to mine out a whole mountain it’s perfectly possible, but it goes faster if you mine a small section and give the hearthlings time to clean up (with crates/containers placed near to the mine site) and repeat that rather than trying to mine thousands of blocks and thus having to deal with thousands of drops (ore, stone) at once. At the end of the day, 80% of the savings come purely from reducing travel times – if the job is big there’s more walking involved, if the job is small then hearthlings don’t have to walk so far between tasks.
And continuing on that theme, the in/out boxes can really save your crafters a ton of time! Imagine your blacksmith having to walk from town out into the mines, then back to town, then back to the mines, then back to town, then out to the woodcutters’ worksite, then back to town, and then start actually smelting a bar… compared to having a different worker make each trip so your blacksmith only has to grab items from the box beside the forge and then get straight to work.
If you have an herbalist in your town, consider using energy tonics, particularly in the afternoon/evening – they’re both a speed boost and an increase to the chances that a hearthling will choose to do an extra job before “knocking off” for the night to sit around the campfire.
If you expect hearthlings to follow a particular path often, it’s worth building a road. I’ve been known to build temporary roads above the ground by using the slab tool to place a block and then building a road off of it. Now that buildings can be demolished and the resources will be returned, it’s easy to use this method for a quick speed boost without committing to your town’s layout right from the start.
Don’t over-order food, harvest too much wood, or over-harvest weaver materials (e.g. silkweed); and don’t over-mine unless you need to make space or something like that. These are classic rookie errors because they take up hearthling time (see above about walking time) and slow down other more important jobs. The idea is to have all your hearthlings busy doing different jobs, not everyone working on one thing. For example, even if you know you’ll need a ton of wood for construction projects, it’s better to harvest a little and then start hauling it to where it’s needed, keep harvesting new sections while the hauling continues and then start building when you have a stockpile of wood (ideally in crates rather than actual stockpiles, for performance) so there’s a constant flow of wood and no builders are ever stuck waiting for resources. When the building is finished, move the crates close to the next one and keep going in the same way.
As a final tip, remember that you can change the number of hearthlings the game allows you to get in your town. If your computer is strong you might want to allow more hearthlings; but many players find the game runs better with less rather than more. After all, each new hearthling adds a lot of work for the computer to keep up with, so more workers doesn’t actually mean faster workers unless you’re also using them efficiently to begin with. In fact, I’d advise trying to learn how to optimise a single worker’s tasks (so follow that one worker and see how they accomplish their tasks to look for ways to speed that up), because you can take those tricks and apply them to the whole town.
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I would suggest removing nearly all light sources. It did it for me at least a few updates ago i had a problem with lag aswell, because of too many lights. I also have problem with only the UI (user interface /the windows in the game) being laggy. but hat fixes itself after saving and reloading.
Also don’t have to many items lying around that could be another source of lag.
Basically:
From what you said it’s not laggy at the start, so it has to be someting that increases in the game over time.
So lights, items and Hearthlings. try reducing those. if that doesn’t help, I don’t know.
To complete quests quickly: (only until hearth quest completion, not the monument quest)
-Start with a hearthling with 6 spirit an realtive high/okayish other stats to become you mason in ascendency or potter in rayyas children. (sirit increases the chance to get a higher quality item)
-start working towards getting a market stall. and use it whenever its ready.(mabe get 2 market stalls)
-Select the bannbeer to get more money,
-Let the mason craft alot of things that only require 1 stone and gives you the most money. then let him craft only Gargoyle. For rayyayschildren you want the potter to do basically the same.
-Sell all the things when a trader appears and buy all the thigs from the trader.
-Select the money hearth.
-don’t forget to use the market stalls
-continue crafting things that give you the most money and sell them and buy stuff until you have enough
traded to fullfill the conditions for the quest