Just curious – it may be time to upgrade my system soon and I was wondering precisely what Stonehearth needs & what people running very large towns (over 30 hearthlings) are running in terms of hardware. I assume this game is basically entirely about CPU speed? Does memory, video card, etc., matter all that much? Win 7 vs Win 10?
If you want to play with a lot of lights (like more than 30, as bad as it sounds) with your shadows maxed out, then you’ll quickly drain your GPU resources.
I have (had) some 45 hearthling saves, on a 4790k (@ 4.5), 16 gigs of ram (2x8 @ 1866) and an R9 270 (~1150/1600), with everything maxed but shadows turned off, and have had to limit the game to 60 fps. Even with 45 hearthlings, I never saw more than 35% of my CPU used (while doing other stuff in the background, too), though I did have about 10 gigs of ram sucked up by the game.
I found that I preferred having my city light up at night like I designed, and even a mix of low shadow settings and a limited number of lights tanked my fps down to <20. I’m not sure what it would take to keep your shadows maxed and lights at 250, but it’s something quite a bit beefier than I have.
If you’re looking for recommendations, you would be hard pressed to go wrong with a k-class i7 (4790k, 6700k, etc), depending on what hardware you have on hand to recycle or upgrade with (DDR3 vs DDR4, stuff like that). At the end of the day though, if you want buttery-smooth game play, sink your cash into your GPU. This ain’t no KSP.
TLDR: CPU helps, but like with most games, FPS with maxed graphics will rely on your GPU at the end of the day.
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Thanks, that’s what I needed to know.
Sounds like the CPU is the limiting factor for hearthlings but the GPU is the limiting factor for graphical framerate, so I probably want to upgrade both. I can deal with minimal shadows, I just want to run forty hearthlings instead of twenty with a minimum of idle time.
I would be happy to provide you with some recommendations based on your current system if you like, but you have the fundamentals right.
I actually like the game right now with shadows turned off, as there are still some shadows which remain.
However, your comment about idle time is interesting to me - even on a very lower power laptop, Hearthstone doesn’t actually “idle” unless I don’t have tasks queued, or the tasks I have queued have blockages (no ladders, no resources). If you have actual idle issues, that’s probably not related to a lack of CPU resources (unless you can see your usages topping out).
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I can see my usages topping out — I’m currently running on a five year old CPU (i5-750) with 8 gigs of ram, and just things like a large-scale mining operation or gathering loot from distant points on the map will make things freeze up into slow mo. When I run it at triple speed i have to pause the game every minute or three so that the hungry hearthlings can remember they need to go get food. In prior alphas I couldn’t run more than 15 hearthlings or so; currently the delays get prohibitive around 25 hearthlings.
Alright, then it looks like stepping into one of the more recent (again, like 4790k or newer) processors would be a first step. Let us know if you have any more questions!
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I am very late… I guess this is for anyone wanting to know about this nowadays. I ran a city with around 60-70 hearthlings on release 1.0, before I had mods or ace or anything. I ran it on a 2015 macbook pro, and I had to run it with the “fallback render” option enabled, or else the camera would jitter quite a bit and I couldn’t get anything done. I also (foolishly) decided to incorporate braziers into the design of all my houses, which meant that in the end I had about 200 lights. I had to take down braziers in parts of the city, which was actually kind of funny from a roleplaying perspective because it was like they were having power outages. But yeah, it does work, and if I had a better computer it would have worked better.