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This bug presents in a very similar way to the bug that was fixed in 0.16.16 under this thread viewtopic.php?f=11&t=55370&p=331467&hil ... er#p331467

This save is from a multiplayer game on the explosive servers that uses a custom scenario script. I dont know how to remove the scenario script from the save so I havent been able to rule that out, but it seems unlikely as it doesnt appear to change biters in any way.

What did you do?
A friend of mine has been prolific over the 24 hours preceding this save building an extensive network of automated defenses with built in artillery turrets. As a result we have killed over 25,000 nests in the last 10 hours of in game time. However, there are a large number of biters that have been left behind as a result and apparently are frozen. According to show active entity counts on chunks these biters are all still active but only seem to do anything when a player approaches. Our defenses are being attacked a bit but only by a few biters here and there.

What happened?
I suspected the problem may have been the number of "active" biters so I loaded the map in SP and ran the command to kill all biters `/c game.forces["enemy"].kill_all_units()`. Average update time dropped from 46ms -> 22ms in a few seconds.

What would I expect to happen?
I would expect that biters from destroyed nests attack the player where possible, join another nest if they cant and despawn after a period if they are unable to do either. Whilst they are not attacking or moving to another nest, I would expect them to use essentially 0 UPS.

Logfile: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YATAMM ... sp=sharing

Savefile: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1K7Pd0 ... meeYS8IbFq

Let me know if you need any more information.

I can confirm that this is still an issue in the latest patch 0.17.5

I believe this issue to be the same or related too the issue reported here:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=68582&p=417832#p417832

I have added some notes to that post, hope they help.

Hello, registered to say that I have this problem too - in version 0.17.23.

I've experienced it in 2 of the 3 games I'm playing at the moment. The worst was in a multiplayer game with a friend. After setting up a large amount of Artillery turrets all at once, and destroying hundeds of spawners, the bitters bugged out in the way described above.

What happens normally is that when the bitters nest gets destroyed by shelling, they all gather up at a nearby spot. Then when they're all assembled, they start moving slowly towards the source of the artillery fire - usually they run into a laser wall and die.

What has been happening recently is that after the bitters nest gets destroyed by shelling, they all gather up at a nearby spot... and then stop. They just stand there, without attacking.
It's possible to order a manual artillery shelling of the clump of bitters, and they all just stand there at the gather spot and die stupidly instead of moving out the way.
If a player approaches the bitters, they suddenly become aggressive and start to chase the player.

The idle bitters seem to cause a lot of lag for my friend. I am hosting the game and he is joining, we both have fiber connections. He says his framerate drops to 5fps. So that is pretty gamebreaking for him, and we've had to stop playing for now.

For me they are just an annoyance, since I have to either manually shell all of them to death, or go out there and fight them in person.

In the other thread, Rseding has asked for a save file demonstrating the slowdown problem, so I've attached the multiplayer game I described above. EDIT - uploaded via google drive instead, guess it's too big for forum attachment. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QredxQ ... sp=sharing
I hope it helps to find out the source of the problem! :>

I had an idea about what might cause this problem.

It might be caused by bitters nests being destroyed by an artillery that is then deconstructed.

I've recently designed a new artillery system that I pick up (with personal roboport) and put down again in different spots.
Perhaps when a large number of bitters nests are destroyed, they all move to their gather spot - expecting that soon it'll be their turn to have an Attack order (i am guessing somewhat at how the AI works here). But then when they try to go for an attack, the artillery turret has been removed, so they become frozen.

I have no evidence that this is the cause, it's just a guess based on what I was recently doing in the game. If this is what's causing it, you could probably reproduce it by killing several hundred bitter nests within the space of 1-2 mins, then deconstructing the artillery turrets that fired the shells.

Hi,

I am playing some softmoded game (Biter Battles) and I experience *heavy* slowdown when large biter attack happens. Framerate drops to 2FPS and UPS drops to 20 or so. Guess what, totally unplayable, UI is fully frozen.

This happens only when biters attack. Otherwise, when game is peacefull, running a steady 60FPS/60UPS.

Is there some optimisation left for biter handling?

Here are some frozen bitters:

https://i.gyazo.com/e82c4a8572a4e04913a ... 28aa11.mp4

After a big shelling they basically always end up like this. In my current save it's easily reproducible - https://drive.google.com/open?id=1dDKeS ... 4oetq-OxPe - just use the artillery shelling remote to blast one of the hives in the far east, and observe all the frozen bitters gather up and then sit there.

If left alone, they do eventually attack in small groups. However these frozen ones sit there for ages, and seem to have a large impact on update time.

Also I believe this bug is related: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=71865

I can confirm similar or identical behaviour in 0.17.68.

Yesterday I found some random biters and spitters from artillery-destroyed nests which walked up to the proximity of my base, but now sit there and do nothing but sit motionless. I can provide a savegame, if needed (I don't have it available here atm).

Shouldn't they attack when shot at by artillery?
https://youtu.be/IfQ6k6cXWeU

0.17.66:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Uw-n7 ... g06UTDizYq
EDIT September 14, 2019:
Also, in the save above, there are multiple groups of aliens around the NW area which I would expect to attack, but seem to be delayed by long periods of time despite their proximity and after having been shot by artillery before the save point.

EDIT September 17, 2019:
While trying to test something unrelated, I noticed biters acting oddly if they spawned at a certain distance. It's a long video, but they seem to go in cycles of acting normally and acting oddly, and I held down left-click and didn't move the mouse. Not sure if it's related. Now I completely forgot what I was originally trying to test...
https://youtu.be/PTLqdkERe_s?t=95

They should attack when shot by artillery, yes.

I know this thread has been here for a long time without any reaction from us, so I would just like to let everyone know that I'm working on this and a fix should be coming in the upcoming weeks.

Thanks, should be fixed in 0.17.70.