[0.17.71] Game gets slower and biters not expanding anymore

[TheRealBecks]

Hi,

I'm playing modded Factorio and testing lots of mods to test different biter behavior. My game got slow, but no biters attacked my in the last few hours, but the map was full of biters and nests. I deleted all biters and their nests (something I have to do in every savegame in the last two years with or without biter mods...):

Code: Select all

/c local surface=game.player.surface
for key, entity in pairs(surface.find_entities_filtered({force="enemy"})) do
	entity.destroy()
end

The UPS went up to 60 again. But this time no biters and nests spawned on the map while the next hours. My UPS went continuously down to 42. I executed the command once again, my game hung about one to two minutes (on an Core i7 3770K) and UPS went back to 60. Since then I played a few hours, but still no biters. I also edited the biter expansion settings with the mod ChangeMapSettings_3.1.4, but that makes no difference.

I uploaded my savegame to my private cloud as the file is 152 MB big: https://nextcloud.exablau.de/s/aDkSEmjM9Q95nSG

Thanks for your help,
Becks

[Klonan]

Well, the problem might be that your map is honking huge, and you have a honking ton of pollution:



At this scale I'm just going to say this isn't a bug

[Klonan]

Well the root cause is you adjusted pollution settings, and now it spreads in ridiculous amounts



And spreading pollution spawns new chunks, and activates nests to send attacks, etc.

[TheRealBecks]

Oh no, really?! Why isn't that written in the map settings when I changed the values before starting the game?! I didn't know that the pollution creates an even bigger map That messed up so many savegames before in the last two years (with different settings, but 300+ MB savegames)... In my opinion it would be good if there's a tool tip in the map settings with that hint.

[valneq]

[…] Why isn't that written in the map settings when I changed the values before starting the game?! I didn't know that the pollution creates an even bigger map […]

I don't think that changing the pollution settings changes the general behaviour. As Klonan wrote:

[…] spreading pollution spawns new chunks, and activates nests to send attacks, etc.

This should be true, even with default pollution settings. So adding a warning to the pollution settings does not really make sense.

As a consistency check: What would you expect to happen if you spread pollution (be it due to large factory or due to increased settings) into chunks you have not explored, yet? Do you expect these chunks to be generated (including terrain, trees, biters, resource patches) and maybe biters starting attacks due to the pollution reaching them? Or do you expect the pollution to essentially get voided by entering the not-yet-existent chunks?

[TheRealBecks]

I thought the pollution gets into the void and is no more. And biters spawn randomly at the chunk regions and expand from there. As simple as that.

A possible idea to avoid lots of unrevealed chunks could be a generation of maybe five chunks from the radar covered chunks on and the pollution from chunk 6 on gets into the void (gets deleted).

[BlueTemplar]

This is kind of already the case :

chunk_generation.png (1.7 MiB) Viewed 4546 times

(Note that some of the chunks (bottom-right) are still in the process of being generated, that's why there aren't any entities there.)
The important difference with your suggestion is that any pollution incoming in a chunk generates that chunk too.

Maybe if you want harder biters you should tweak other settings instead, like lowering the Attack Cost Modifier ?

[valneq]

A possible idea to avoid lots of unrevealed chunks could be a generation of maybe five chunks from the radar covered chunks on and the pollution from chunk 6 on gets into the void (gets deleted).

If I read your suggestion correctly, you want to void the pollution that goes too deep into unrevealed chunks. Voided pollution cannot trigger enemy attacks. This effectively punishes people who explore the map (and have more revealed chunks, pushing the voiding limit further away), while making the game much easier for people who pollute very much in one single location but don't explore the larger area around them. Why should exploring the map make the game more difficult? To save computational cost for the people who don't explore the map? Does not sound very convincing.

Did you change the pollution settings to have more attacks? If so, try BlueTemplar's suggestion:

Maybe if you want harder biters you should tweak other settings instead, like lowering the Attack Cost Modifier ?

Furthermore, I believe the biters start expanding from the current spawner locations: new spawners are generated from regular biters/spitters sacrificing at some point. But these biters/spitters need to be sent from a spawner in the first place. If you deleted a lot of biters (and spawners) from the generated chunks, you will need to wait a *looong* time until the gradual expansion will reach your factory. In any case, the absorbed pollution should trigger attacks even from very far away.

Wait a minute: is it possible that this entire issue started before the recent pathfinding changes? On this map, the biters might have had a hard time actually finding their paths to your base -- leading to the FPS drops. Deleting the biters from the generated chunks then reduces this computational cost for the moment. Later, when the pollution generates more chunks with more spawners, these spawners will send attacks to your base, but they again probably had a hard time pathfinding to your base, again resulting in FPS drops. Did the FPS drops get better with the recent pathfinding in 0.17.70?

[TheRealBecks]

I tested lots of different settings in the last months, but that don't lead into more biters. So I started testing the pollution settings.

Also the new pathfinding system don't work (?) with my savegame: new bug report
I still trying to find out why the biters don't attack.

[Loewchen]

The report here is closed. If you want to make a feature request see Ideas and suggestions.