Does anyone else get freezes/pauses when autosave is saving?

[Hillbilly_Dave]

I don't want to disable it in case the game crashes because it has crashed before and in the age of every video games has an auto save I don't want to have to try to remember to manually save every few minutes but the consistent freezing for a second or two during an autosave is annoying because I won't realize it's happening until I've tried to draw an area for building or planting or whatever and the game will have froze up for a sec for autosave and it executes the queue of button presses after the autosave freeze is over but it uses the current position of the mouse so I end up drawing paths and crops and whatever in places I didn't want them. It's not hard to fix it but because it happens so often it's very annoying.

[Colorful Colorado]

Firstly, that was almost the longest run-on sentence I've ever seen. XD

Secondly, yeah it always kinda freezes for a sec when it auto saves, but since the last update (experimental branch) it freezes a lot harder and even the graphics seize up for a second.

I think it just needs to pause everything in order to save but it is a bit jarring. I've never had a CTD(crash to desktop) before though.

[Grat Dalton]

Yes, i have 1 to 3 second pauses during auto save at high population.There is an option in main menu to disable this console feature.
- If your pc OR mods are causing game crashes, you should manually save often to prevent data loss.
If you don't want to remember manual save game, than fix the issue with your pc OR mods to prevent game crashes.
- 300 hours no game crash.

[grilled.dev_Mechanistry]

Depending on your pc's specs or (more often) the settlement size the autosaves times can be more noticeable. You can send us your log files at [e-mail] and we can investigate if there's some issue that's making them a lot longer than they should be. Here's how to find them: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1062090/discussions/2/3110269213859735252/
Please make sure to mention it's about auto save times in the email.

[Hillbilly_Dave]

Originally posted by Colorful Colorado:

Firstly, that was almost the longest run-on sentence I've ever seen. XD

Secondly, yeah it always kinda freezes for a sec when it auto saves, but since the last update (experimental branch) it freezes a lot harder and even the graphics seize up for a second.

I think it just needs to pause everything in order to save but it is a bit jarring. I've never had a CTD(crash to desktop) before though.

Yeah I'm normally better about that kind of thing but was in a hurry and just ran with it, literally lol. I've had one CTD with this game since update 6 though I'm playing experimental/beta so it's not exactly super weird for that to have happened. To be clear about what I mean by a CTD, the game stopped responding and a bug reporter thingie popped up. It didn't literally CTD without explanation.

Unrelated side note, are you in Colorado? If so, hello from Utah, neighbor.

[RhyoliTe]

I have the same issue and my PC is fairly beefy especially for a game like Timberborn.
I assume it is normal on the experimental branch since I don't experience this on the main branch, or at least I didn't used to (am playing on experimental atm).

[Hillbilly_Dave]

Originally posted by RhyoliTe:

I have the same issue and my PC is fairly beefy especially for a game like Timberborn.
I assume it is normal on the experimental branch since I don't experience this on the main branch, or at least I didn't used to (am playing on experimental atm).

Same. I have a pretty beefy computer by most standards, and especially for a game like Timberborn unless there's a ton of clunky, slow code running behind the scenes.

[Nekogod]

Same issue here on a brand new game. It just seems like saving is really badly implemented, 2-3 second hitches from the first save so with like 12 beavers and 2-3 buildings. Autosaves in other, bigger, more complex games don't have this issue until you're many hours in and have a massive city/factory/population etc.

Maybe its having to save the position and flow of all the water I don't know, but it's incredibly inefficient code.

My current save is 700kb and takes 2-3 seconds to save, which is ridiculous.

My PC isn't top of the line, but it's no slouch either it should take a fraction of a second to save a file less than 1mb

AMD 5900x
32gb DDR4
RTX3090
7200 mb/s PCIe4 NVME SSD

[Meldiron]

I am also having this issue. I am currently on cycle 13 with a 2 district size settlement. But the autosave has been causing the game to freeze for a 1-3 seconds every time, from the very beginning of the game. Did not have this issue on 0.5. I also do not generally have this issue with other games until I've built thousands of things.

i5-11400F
32GB DDR4
RTX 2060
7200 RPM 2TB HDD SATA 6Gb/s

[Wolfman]

I cannot confirm this. Only in colonies with around 500 beavers and above, autosave becomes noticible, but far away from touching a one second delay.

[Nekogod]

I disabled autosaves cause it was driving me nuts (it needs improvements in general like number of saves to keep and how frequent to save) and the issue persists so seems it may not be the save causing it.

Since disabling it I played for 2 hours straight and had approximately 12-15 instances where the entire game froze for 1-3 seconds then carried on as normal.

[nordstern]

I could decrease the time for the savefreezes with a trick...

I reduced the sight of the screen to an area were not so many structures and beavers are. This has impact on the gamespeed (so i think my performance problems are coming from to many beavers/objects on a to low area, because i try to build as efficent as possible) and by reducing these performance problems (taskmanager says its not the pc, so it i think is the engine. And with this i think its the new 3D-Watersystem. because my gamespeed and shuttering depends on how many water in my huge resservior is. If its not full the performance is much better.

But with decreasing this impact the freeze from autosaves also reduces significant. I think the engine has more power for autosave available if it must not calculate to many visual objects on the map.

I have
Radeon 6800XT
AMD 5800X
32 Gb Ram
and an SSD for the games, HDD for data and windows

And the taskmanager and the driver of the grafic card are saying:
max. 14% GPU, 22% CPU (nearly all cores a bit) (including other programs running) and 13Gb Ram (only Timberborn) is used by the game. So much space left. But on the other side my coolers are hearable (i have a really silent pc, so i recognize this). And the temperature says i have 74 degrees GPU for example. For example: current highend games with 64% GPU (more i have never seen currently) will reach the same degrees but lesser noise.

So the question is why this game has so low impact to the hardware but generates more heat than much more challanging games. And i am no hardware-software freak. But i think here is the problem. maybe the game tries to calculate to many data with less ressources which ends in a huge traffic between VRam/Ram and GPU/CPU and so the speed of this pipes is limiting and creating heat like a filament. These pipes are slower than the VRam can do. And i know that because the VRam is faster than the Ram many developers are trying to use the VRam instead of the Ram and outsource calculation to the faster GPU than CPU.

If you do not do thi sproperly it can have troubles with the speed the pips can max. have.

[WhatsUpHiro]

The game honestly feels highly unoptimized. I just finished Final Fantasy 16, where I could load my save in the space of under 10 seconds. Whereas I just timed loading my Timberborn save. NINETY. NINE. SECONDS! This is a bunch of beavers in shanty huts. Come on, it has to be faster than this.

[nordstern]

The game has Multicore, Multithread and 64bit support. So it can (and does) use all cores (real and fictive) and unlimited Ram. Why does it not? Why does it try to use as less as possible with the problem of performance?

I first thought the engine has limits (is in most games so) but if this were so, my pc would not generate so much heat with so low utilization. So i think its the way the engine split up the calculations to the hardware.

And here i do not know why? This game will never break the limits of modern pcs... the grafics is to bad and the calculations are not so complex. So it can use much more capacity than it does. Maybe this would solve many issues. Especially if the new 3D water is not made for this game and the engine has problems with it.

I have heared in several threads that the amount of water on a map has massive impact to the performance. What is a problem for me, because i want it challanging and so i doubled the duration of dry and bad tide. And so i must have much, much more water for the plants and in storage.

Be happy... i must load my save (huge waterreserve, 288 beavers (but the same with 108 beavers)) in 30+sec. I must look were the game saves the files.. maybe not in steam on the SSD, instead on the HDD. But eben if.. this should not take so long. In this time i can load 2 saves in warhammer 3 or start a battle with more than 20k units on max settings.

[Deadman]

Multi-threading can't just perfectly break up any workload. As you scale up a game engine there will always be logic on some thread that will eventually max out a core and you will get CPU bound. Besides the water simulation there is a ton of path finding and other logic in this game. When hardcore players are doing 500, 700, 1000 beavers you are pushing limits that most players never will.

Considering the game is built on Unity, and how difficult multi-threading is in that engine, I think they have done a great job. If you saw this game a few years back you would see it has come a long way.

There are optimizations you can make if you build huge settlements. Getting rid of superfluous roads helps a lot, keeping possible routes to a minimum, keeping things closer together, cleaning up extra clutter, blocking off unneeded flow and pools from the water, etc. Lowering the FPS cap incrementally can help with stuttering as you get past 500.