Factorio Forums

Curious what kind of resources I might find, I recently tried exploring very, very deep into the wilderness and, for shits and giggles, leaving behind a radar station. My save instantly went from ~50 to ~25 UPS. As best I can tell, this is because in my explorations I caused many, many chunks to be generated and they are now all full of biters, whose deep, biter-ey thoughts now occupy my CPU.

If it were somehow magically possible for the many chunks I explored to be eventually marked as "uninteresting" by the game and returned to the void from whence they came, then I presume things would return to normal. However, iiuc this never happens in factorio.

Perhaps, it could?

For example, imagine there was some criterion, "c_sleep", which, if met by a given chunk, would cause its state to be saved off, somewhere (let's call this "cold storage"), and thereafter indefinitely "non-simulated," and some other criterion, "c_wake" which would cause such chunks to be restored and "re-animated", much as if they had been spawned for the first time, except, in this case, they would be so-to-speak "spawned" non-algorithmically as the game would simply restore their old contents from cold storage.

This could represent a real amelioration of the problem that, eventually, biter evolution "has to" run amok (for balance reasons), resulting in a UPS-destroying death-world.

golfmiketango wrote:Curious what kind of resources I might find, I recently tried exploring very, very deep into the wilderness and, for shits and giggles, leaving behind a radar station. My save instantly went from ~50 to ~25 UPS. As best I can tell, this is because in my explorations I caused many, many chunks to be generated and they are now all full of biters, whose deep, biter-ey thoughts now occupy my CPU.

If it were somehow magically possible for the many chunks I explored to be eventually marked as "uninteresting" by the game and returned to the void from whence they came, then I presume things would return to normal. However, iiuc this never happens in factorio.

Perhaps, it could?

For example, imagine there was some criterion, "c_sleep", which, if met by a given chunk, would cause its state to be saved off, somewhere (let's call this "cold storage"), and thereafter indefinitely "non-simulated," and some other criterion, "c_wake" which would cause such chunks to be restored and "re-animated", much as if they had been spawned for the first time, except, in this case, they would be so-to-speak "spawned" non-algorithmically as the game would simply restore their old contents from cold storage.

This could represent a real amelioration of the problem that, eventually, biter evolution "has to" run amok (for balance reasons), resulting in a UPS-destroying death-world.

The game already does this - chunks without things that need to be run aren't touched and are just left in RAM. By placing down the radar and possibly other things like chopping trees (making corpses of trees) or killing biters (making corpses of biters) the game have to keep running those chunks until those corpses "finish" and go away.

Rseding91 wrote:The game already does this - chunks without things that need to be run aren't touched and are just left in RAM. By placing down the radar and possibly other things like chopping trees (making corpses of trees) or killing biters (making corpses of biters) the game have to keep running those chunks until those corpses "finish" and go away.

I guess I knew that -- you're talking about active vs inactive chunks, correct?

I guess my assumption was that the presence of (living) biters and/or nests would prevent them from becoming inactive.

But, I see now I was, indeed, wrong. While I was out there, I may have started some small forest fires which, come to think of it, combined with the resulting pollution, probably accounts for some of the UPS drop I experienced. I also see that, as that pollution has dissipated, many of the chunks down there which were previously 24/7 active, including most of those with fog-of-war biter map-icons, have indeed gone silent.

Is it an objective of factorio's business-logic, then, that, in the absence of any industrial activity, exogenous entity ingress, pollution ingress, and/or intelligence, due to i.e., mods or radars, all chunks will tend to eventually become permanently inactive?

Or, will they periodically be woken up, i.e., to give biters the opportunity to stretch their legs?

As best I can observe, when an eligible expansion attempt occurs (i.e. a nest is going to send out an expansion party), that chunk becomes active again, as evidenced by the debug mode showing activity in that chunk. But otherwise they stay inactive.