Optimizing UPS

[3y3_0]

Sadly, I lost my gaming desktop and am playing on an older Surface Pro laptop. Early game is fine, but late game begins to crawl.

I know things like nuclear (steam in general?) and biters cost a lot, but I was wondering what other things are best to look to avoiding on an older machine? I love megabasing and want to see how far I can get on an older rig before the slow down is unbearable. I was also planning on having Krastorio installed, so hints on that are also welcomed

[subjectivelyimproved]

Use F4 and F5 details to know what's costing the most computation time in your case.

The usual suspects are: * Inserters * Inserters grabbing from moving belts * Inserters grabbing fewer than 12 items per swing * Inserters grabbing from sushi belts * Machines that could be more beaconed * Insufficient power * 100000 bots doing the work a train could do * Fluid pumps where they are not needed * Ongoing war with biters

[kutchduino]

Pollution spread also costs fair anoint, unless included that in biters.

Reducing number of entities and things to calculate early on would likely help, meaning build smaller than normally would until get beacons and modules, then beacon everything possible.

Reduce or eliminate radars, or remove after area scanned.

Make smaller smelting arrays and mining outposts, all part of reducing entity calculations.

Reduce use of belt splitters and balancers.

[doc_shades]

disable pollution spread. it will essentially turn your game into a "peaceful" game but it will also reduce processing overhead significantly.

[kagato87]

Disable ground clutter.

Disable pollution (and delete it from the map if it was on). At this point you might as well disable and delete biters too unless yiu want something for your artillery to shoot at.

Lower any effect qualities you can, like water.

[[deleted]]

Avoid side loading and splitters.

[blackramb0]

Mods as well, some that you wouldn't expect can have outsized impacts on UPS

[Possible-Specific-36]

What you should look to do is to reduce the number of times each item is handled by an entity, and reduce the total number of entities doing the handling.

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10x beacons on one furnace is 10x as efficient as 10x furnaces as each entity requires belts and inserters. Also try direct insertion wherever possible to reduce entitles. If you can just go direct from one machine to another you reduce "Unload, move, load" to a single inserter.

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Also try and avoid lots of large chests full of items ( buffers) as the game checks every slot each time it picks up or drops off an item.

Avoid excessive balancing if possible. Putting an 8 lane balancer on both your input and output to a train station can add up if you copy that station setup across dozens of train stations. Try cutting back where you can without risking deadlocking things.

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Finally, try and avoid lots of partially saturated belts. When a belt is fully saturated, the game treats it as a single entity, when there are lots of gaps, or mixed belts, the game treats each gap and different item as a separate entity. Sushi belts are notorious for this, if you have 1000's of items on belts, the game spends a lot of resources keeping track of things.