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Community Factories

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Robert Cassidy edited this page May 13, 2025 · 2 revisions

The goals for community factories:

  1. Giving trains a greater purpose in our world
  2. Creating a community activity that ties players together, so we want people to contribute to building factories and to use the system, work together, etc.
  3. addressing a technical problem we encountered in the last season, namely that our base was laggy for most players. That lag wasn't due to GPU, but to single core performance incurred by Create calculating. Any time we were at our base, all of our factory production was loaded and being calculated, even if it wasn't doing anything (because vaults were full, etc.). This was most strongly felt on the client, but also impacts the server. Players could usually tell as soon as we logged in as the game would lag somewhat. This is a problem we're seeking to solve this season.

Our solution to this is the Power Loader mod and distributing the production around the map. Don't think of the Power Loader as a chunk loading solution - it's a chunk unloading solution. You stick your huge cobble generator out in the weeds somewhere where it is by default unloaded, and it only loads when you send a train there (or visit by other means), the train fills up and leaves, and the factory stays loaded until buffers are full, and then it unloads. You keep all the benefit of having access to that production capacity (with the latency incurred by the trains) but you can unload that capacity when it's not needed - something you can't otherwise do around your base (except to leave your base). In our case, apart from our small starter setup, we could choose to have few production machines loaded and rely on trains to bring us resources and just have a big sorter to make them convenient.

Loading chunks itself is a burden on the server, but we need to contextualize that. Current limits are 8(?) chunks from the player, so everyone is loading about 289 (17x17) chunks, even when AFK. The Power Loader mod can load as few as 1 chunk and as many as 25, and our goal is to try and keep factories to 9 chunks, so when last season we ran over to load our tree farm, we were loading 289 chunks (plus the hundreds or thousands of others involved in traveling there) and now we're hoping to load about 9. Scheduled trains are always loaded, but the chunks around them are not, so this should result in a large reduction in chunk loading overall.

Toward that, we hope that other players will use these factories, and help build them, and further creating a shared, connected world.

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