7 Tips to Improve Performance | Oxygen Not Included

We look at 7 ways you can help keep your favorite colony sim running smooth!

End Screen music: When Johnny Comes Marching Home by Cooper Cannell

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Coordinates: V-SFRZ-C-469570110-8VW3

Mods:
Show Building Ranges by Stephen
Bigger Camera Zoom Out by Cairath
Pliers Fixed by oDr4gONo & pt_djefferson(Rus)

[instazx]

I dug into decompiled sources several months ago -- these are very good guesses for what's going on, but some aren't as helpful as others. The game engine's "ticks" are independent of the FPS, and the ticks are what feel "laggy". An example of a bad 'tick' rate is when dupes are just standing somewhere kinda jittering back and forth, when there's a ton of tasks they could be doing.

Fixing pathfinding is a good way to solve this, but you missed a really big one: limit what the dupes themselves can do. In the priority system, instead of double-deprioritizing tasks, just disable them. Have tasks so granular that each dupe can only do one or two things, which cuts down on the chore contention dramatically. This also cuts down on the amount of pathfinding needed, and plays really well into the infinite storage as well.

[LagiacrusHunter]

So what I'm hearing is my next colony should be a single-dupe moonlet run. Excellent idea, Echo!

[ivanmarcusdegoeslopes]

me and my potato pc thank you, randomly recomended wise internet man

[JayRay]

I know a lot of us are averse to it, but I set up infinite liquid and gas storage for the same performance issues. I know it's an exploit but I think a lot of players have had giant liquid pools or tons of tanks everywhere and it takes a long time and is material-intensive but after a certain number of colonies it seems more work than it's worth. I figure once you do the non-exploit stuff 8 or 9 times you earn the right to do it lol

[BentTreeFarmPa]

I’m an old guy, but love watching your vids. I’ve been thinking about trying the game the more I learn from you, thanks.

[SlimThrull]

As for pathfinding, you can install transit tubes to a handful of areas around the planetoid. This drastically cuts down on path finding because dupes prefer to use the fastest method for getting from point A to B. Since tubes are almost always faster, they'll use those. Then the sim only has to calculate the path finding from the exit point to the destination point. If done correctly, this should save LOTS of calculations.
As for liquids and gases, I would recommend finding a mod that significantly increases the storage capacity of the storage units. This will allow you to store both liquids and gases in them and not have to worry about all the calculations going on in the sim.

[sha]

Very helpful info! I almost always have sweep commands running on a lower priority, and once a job is finished in an area it gets cleaned up before I move on (I can't stand debris everywhere! lol). Yet I honestly never took into consideration all of the calculations the game has to do for gasses and liquids as well. Of course, I should have, it's rather logical once you think about it, but until now I hadn't... I have some gasses to get pumping, lol.

Tysmfs! Hope you has a nice week and have a great weekend. Best of wishes!

[VidalIC]

The debries stacking help more because of the pathing, when you build something the pathing will check all debris to choose where to get the material from. In the DLC I'm stocking everything in Rocket Tanks they can hold a lot and don't change temperature, they also make the material unavable to dups so there is no calculation for pathing unless I make it available.

[kks_grandma]

Thanks for this video! My 150 dupe game is already struggling and this (along with the comments) helped explain a lot of reasons why it may be happening. If trying these tips doesn't help, it may be time for a CPU upgrade.

[alexmcd]

There can be a big CPU / GPU difference in this game, but conveniently the things that reduce one usually reduces the other in this game. The pretty swirling colors when gasses mix are GPU. The physics of gas interacting are CPU. The graphics won't likely show you down unless you have onboard graphics like a non gaming laptop or steam deck, which use the CPU to do graphics and the math.

[ericab]

Also limit piping, especially branched piping or pipe priority with filters. Liquid gas and conveyor piping all use pathfinding algorithms. Make sure you get rid of any defunct or "legacy" piping from turned off builds.

[granularity]

One thing that really helps my starting base is to only put one material per storage bin, on sweep only.
It keeps the morning lag away until I leave the base and rip apart the outside.
Thanks for the tips. The ladder tip also made an impact.

[ItIsJustWolf]

Genuinely liked this video because it is different and extremely helpful too

[MrDerReiter]

Some mods can even improve the performance. For example, the mods "conduit teleport" and "advanced storage". Those greatly decrease the amount of pipe sections on the map and сonsequently decrease calculations for liquid circles\gas squares in pipes. The second mod also potentially allows storaging all liquids and gases on the map in tanks; that saves FPS even more. Yes, it's a bit of cheating, but choosing between not really fair and laggy I'd better take the first)

[sdollCarol]

Thank you for the tips. My 10 year old MacBook pro is really struggling with ONI. My latest colony is just under 600 cycles and the frame rate is painfully slow and each save takes longer and longer and longer!

[stends]

Having a bunch of Storage boxes asking for items (that is, when not using "sweep only") will tax the job queue(s) for the dupes. So keep it to "sweep only" when you can, and use only a select few boxes without. Use storage droppers (with sweep only) for large dumpsters of items. Storage boxes also exchange temperature with outside, and each item inside requires its own calculation.

[Lorens]

One thing I saw during my playthroughs is that time behind the fog doesn't move, drastically reducing calculations the game should do. Fog can also be used to preserve reasources - nothing spoils, geysers don't errupt, critters stay alive and so on. You could, for example, save the game, dig your way into the fog to look what's behind it, then reload the save. XD

[ladyruff]

Firstly, I would like to thank you for the nice video, secondly, thanks to you again, this is the first time I have been able to have a run where I was able to get into atmo suits. I always wondered why people, when they had atmo suits, never vented the gasses outside their sealed off base. Just always seemed like a good idea to work in a vacuum to me.

[moglichpopper]

Nice tips and entertaining to watch. Are you planning to make a video on storage/automation. Saw that in this video but I don’t know howto set that up in my run.

[aaronspain]

So put the gas in to a gas reservoir, to reduce the number of squares that have to have gas calculations on them.... but what about the gases on top of the reservoir? Wouldn't it be better to put everything in vacuum except for the areas that actually need air?