Factorio Forums

What are active chunks?
what performance impact do they have?

after enabling the debug option `show-active-chunks`
I noticed that beacons, steam turbines, steam engines and destroyed ghost entities will permanently keep chunks active
should they not allow the chunk to sleep?

moving trains, bitters and fish seem to only keep a chunk active temporary
how come all other entities don't contribute to the `active-chunk` stat?

Thanks for the report however this is not a bug. I’m moving this to technical help as it’s a simple question about how game mechanics work.

Active chunks have the performance impact of what ever entities need to be updated in those chunks. Ghosts of destroyed entities, beacons, and corpses update every 150~ ticks until they time out. I’m the case of beacons they never time out.

Other entities don’t use the chunk system but update globally as needed.