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Multiplayer
Critical Path works in multiplayer, including dedicated servers. The host measures the factory and sends the report to you.
Open the panel as a joined client and you get the full report - PATH, BALANCE and PLAN - labelled "from the host", so you always know where the reading came from.
Machine inventories, storage levels, station contents and fluid buffers are all tracked by the server. A joined client can see buildings but reads empty values for their contents.
If the client analysed that itself the result would solve perfectly cleanly and be completely wrong - every machine would look starved, because from the client's point of view every machine is empty. That is worse than no answer, because you would act on it.
So the client does not compute a report. It asks the host, which has the real numbers, and shows what comes back.
- You get the same report the host sees. Nothing is summarised or trimmed for transmission.
- It is labelled as the host's reading, because it is - measured there, and already a moment old by the time it reaches you.
- Press REFRESH to ask again. The host shares one measurement with everyone who asks at around the same time, so several players refreshing at once costs it no more than one player would.
- The honesty rules carry across. If the host's scan hit its limits, your copy says so too. Nothing is quietly tidied up in transit.
Fully supported - this is the case the feature was built and tested against. Install Critical Path on the server as well as on clients.
You will see a message saying the host cannot send a report. That means the host is running a build of Critical Path from before host-to-client reports existed. Ask them to update, or open the panel on the host machine.
Keeping versions matched between server and clients avoids this, and a range of other mismatches.
The host reads the world and then does the heavy solving in the background. On a very large factory the reading step costs it roughly a tenth of a second, once, when somebody asks. Nothing runs on a timer - a report is produced only when a player requests one.