Wish Iād thought about or known the lotus potion trick. Or even just thought to make admin and reset. But I had wanted to test something out so I just threw that away.
I deleted the game, downloaded the 56gb mess, new clean game. Starting new is always great but its because I donāt build big at first or chase many Thralls.
Standard PS4, singleplayer, offline.
This time I skip all that, admin to 60, set feats and attribures. Run to the black galleon where I usually put my first big-ish base, mainly due to an overhang for a single drop elevator down to the river.
Instead of my usual starter I build up over time, I go for a ācompactā 2 temple design but still with overhang on back. Instead of open floor, more like a home interior design. Instead of simple pillars with a couple foundations at bottom for overhang, lots of foundations, fence foundations, walls, crenellations. Main base interior is 15x8 plus one outer foundation shell making it 17x10, plus guard posts to break up exterior lines, make it look more like a castle. Another good 15+ tile run out back with two 3x3s for compost and planters and beehive for the aesthetics.
At this point, bit more lag, not bad. Add lights. Add more lights. Get light crazy. Still ok, bit more stutter, but ok.
Add stations, add crafters, add archers, fighters and dancers. Equip them. Add in all those items from last game and the chests. Move things around. Move more items around. At this point I start getting the freezes. They start happening steady when I populate the game with all the game items you need to progress. All the inventory madness to feed the supply chain and asset management.
Note Iām not harvesting. Iām not using the crafters to make things. Just spawning what I need to build. Not one is doing anything other than standard crafter animations, side saddle waddle bounce and dancers dancing. I did fully upgrade all peaceable Thralls with weapons and armor.
Freezes (not hard crashes) seem to happen around saves. Use to, always only lost 1-3 actions from right before the freeze. Post DLC now it can be more. More time, missing items, screwed attributes, duped items.
Hard crash, one. Luckily nothing much lost, no craziness this time.
Build a fully closed off greater wheel just outside Set city. No Thralls, archers, fighters or dancers. Just wheel, small campfire, 5 chests. 9x9 total with outer shell, 4 high, guard posts to break up lines and crens. Still getting unrecoverable freezes but hard crash, not yet.
Place tower 3 tile wide side, plus outer shell and small overhang into water in Set city. Fish traps, elevator, guard posts, fence foundations. Every bit I build makes game worse without adding additional Thralls or items. Like crossing a tipping point.
Started adding placeables in tower. Lights, then downstairs large campfire, chests, 3 furnaces, stove, 2 preservation boxes, 6 presses and ginger, 2 cauldrons. No thralls, no items, only personal inventory access during building
A hard crash. Everything after lights was wiped. Stats still good, but that by of fiddly work was lost.
With years working operations in large multinationals, it sounds like memory leaks, memory space constraints probably exacerbated by DLC items even without purchase, poor optimizations in memory mangement and probable race conditions and/or deadlocks depending on how state is being saved.
With a closed platform like a console I cannot dig in and look at metrics under load or parse logs for clues. Throw in additional new processes and cleanup scripts (AFK kicker, anti-griefing land claim, server post restart state management scripts for placeables, item scrub for dupers). Make it worse if you are overloading exisiting functions to save time on fixes means unintended bugs in non-related processes. All things Iāve seen in other industries with bigger teams, more money and more time but seem to be a common thread to development mindsets.
