I’m running the game on a system with an i7 8086K, 16gb DDR4 RAM and a 1080ti,
Only mods I’m running is the ACE mod.
The game kind of stutters and it only uses up to 20% of my CPU and 2.5gb of RAM, since there is a lot of juice left over that my computer could give I’m wondering if there’s a way to allocate more RAM and CPU power to the game.
I hope someone could help with this,
Thanks!
i dont think there is much you can do because game is extremely unoptimized but it’s still playable and fun.
Reason you see about 20% cpu is because it max out one thread on your cpu and most others threads barely do any work compared to that one thread.
Only thing you could do would be to overclock CPU even more so that 1 thread becomes stronger
Check your BIOS settings and enable the proper overclocking settings for your needs if applicable. Try to use overclocking software such as Intel Extreme Tuning Utility. Be careful when adjusting values as to not hinder system stability/lifespan.
hard drive read/write speed is also a big factor in Stonehearth since so much data has to be stored there instead of in RAM.
Aside from that, there’s some general tips for any simulation-heavy game of how player choices can have a huge impact on performance too:
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break big tasks down into smaller steps. Whether it’s building, mining, chopping trees or fighting a large group of enemies, or even just cleaning away loot that’s on the ground, every action that the hearthlings need to do will add strain to that one core (which @Banto mentioned) and clog up the game’s ability to process other things. The biggest bottleneck here is pathfinding – the more that hearthlings need to walk around to do their jobs, the longer that job takes and thus the slower everything goes. Keep resources near workstations, don’t clear-cut whole forests or mine entire mountains, build large buildings in sections or break them into a lot of smaller templates… these might all seem silly to put in a list, but you’d be amazed how many players overlook these basic things. Make sure to finish one task before you start the next, too – having lots of buildings in progress will cause obvious lag and cause your processor to “cap out” (which leads to further delays e.g. hearthlings standing idle because they can’t compute their jobs), while waiting a couple of minutes for each to finish before starting the next will save you a ton of time overall.
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store away items whenever you can. Less items on the ground means less for your game to keep track of, it’s much easier for it to track “one chest with 64 logs inside it” than 64x “log on the ground”; and that only gets worse when you have things like food laying around because there’s extra logic associated with that (e.g. rotting.)
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keep numbers of livestock, enemies, and pets down; particularly if you want to run a lot of hearthlings. Every AI “brain” the game has to keep track of is going to pull resources from that same thread, so figure out which ones are important and which ones you don’t need so many of.
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consider using a smaller map mod if you’re not going to use the whole default map. This is a highly personal choice, but again pathfinding (i.e. entities walking around) is the biggest use of processor resources so if you reduce the pathable area you’re not using then it’s less for the game to keep track of.
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related to the above: make sure that hearthlings have easy access to everywhere they’ll need to go regularly, and block off/don’t create access to places you’ll never use. For example, if you want to carve a “Mount Hearthmore” face in a mountain then make sure to clear away any mining drops and remove the ladders after you’re done so that the game never has to waste time checking whether that’s a good place for hearthlings to walk through on their way to other tasks. With that said, if you’re going to block off an area make sure it doesn’t fill up with enemies which have spawned in it – they’ll constantly try to find a way into your town (or at least they’ll try for a minute or so and then give up), and once again, that chews up the space in the processing thread for AIs to run.
The gist of this advice is “keep it simple and work in bite-sized chunks”, if you do that you won’t get stuck with having bitten off more than you (or your PC) can easily chew. And that doesn’t mean sacrificing gameplay – you can still build large buildings, or have a bustling town, or herd a thousand sheep and become a woven-goods empire… you just have to think ahead about how you’ll keep things flowing smoothly and not leave your game with thousands of needless extra decisions to make.