SSD - what's a good one?

[MerlinCross]

Getting tired of like 30-hour load times, at times because the game freezes mid load or crashes at title screen.

So probably either A need an SSD or B perhaps more memory. Either or maybe both. To people that have it on an SSD, what suggestions would you have for shopping for one(Cause there's a few other games I'd like to maybe try with one besides just Rimworld).

[Jigain]

Originally posted by MerlinCross:

Getting tired of like 30-hour load times, at times because the game freezes mid load or crashes at title screen.

A better idea than buying an SSD would be to remove the broken mods from your mod list. None of those things are normal. Even heavily modded, with over 300+ mods, I don't think I've ever reached five minutes of load time, much less thirty hours. But of more concern would be the crashes and freezes before you even get into the game proper, that indicates you're running some extremely broken stuff. Just getting rid of broken mods might reduce your load times by more than 29 hours.

[Steelfleece]

An SSD won't help as much as you'd think with RimWorld loads. It's mostly processor work during those long loads, so... Either a new CPU, a new rig for a new CPU, or clean up your mods list. Cheapest option is C. My system is using the absolute best CPU it can mount, but it's pretty old, so that's really my option until it's time to replace it too.

[MerlinCross]

Originally posted by Jigain:

Originally posted by MerlinCross:

Getting tired of like 30-hour load times, at times because the game freezes mid load or crashes at title screen.

A better idea than buying an SSD would be to remove the broken mods from your mod list. None of those things are normal. Even heavily modded, with over 300+ mods, I don't think I've ever reached five minutes of load time, much less thirty hours. But of more concern would be the crashes and freezes before you even get into the game proper, that indicates you're running some extremely broken stuff. Just getting rid of broken mods might reduce your load times by more than 29 hours.

HAH HA.... probably me being stupid in how I organized it. Let's go with me being stupid.

At times I have anywhere from a 30 minute wait time loading the game UP to an Hour(as if the game hard crashes mid load or at title screen well have to try again). To me 30-Hour reads, 30 minutes up to an hour. But it wouldn't be the first time I confused people.

Originally posted by Steelfleece:

An SSD won't help as much as you'd think with RimWorld loads. It's mostly processor work during those long loads, so... Either a new CPU, a new rig for a new CPU, or clean up your mods list. Cheapest option is C. My system is using the absolute best CPU it can mount, but it's pretty old, so that's really my option until it's time to replace it too.

Perhaps if I list out specs, people can tell me what would be the best thing to improve on. I've been thinking about an SSD for other games and the long wait time for Rimworld is something that pushed me over the edge. YES I have Rocketman, YES I have changed settings, YES I have even put in the Performance fish but I'm still looking at long load times. And, at time of writing, with Hugslib not letting me share logs, I have no idea where to even start finding out what works and doesn't(and just tired of jumpping through hoops every time, just buy an upgrade and see what happens.)

Anyway specs.
Inspiron 5680
Processor - Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8400 CPU @ 2.80GHz 2.81 GHz
8.00 GB (7.89 GB usable)

[Steelfleece]

Thirty minutes sounds worse than it was on my old rig with about 80 or 100 mods. Keep in mind my old rig was from 2007 or 2008 from when multicore CPUs were a relatively new thing. Even then initial loads were closer to 15 minutes. A new system/CPU may be something to look into at that rate.

[MerlinCross]

Originally posted by Steelfleece:

Thirty minutes sounds worse than it was on my old rig with about 80 or 100 mods. Keep in mind my old rig was from 2007 or 2008 from when multicore CPUs were a relatively new thing. Even then initial loads were closer to 15 minutes. A new system/CPU may be something to look into at that rate.

I edited the post to include your first one, and threw in the specs I'm running with. Mine's from 2019 but it was a Dell pick up rather than custom built.

[Steelfleece]

In theory, an i5-8400 should be roughly equal to my current rig, with an i7-4790k. Maybe even better than it. In that case, I'd definitely take a closer look at your mod list and ensure you need all those. My own list is...Shall we say, somewhat bloated, and its initial loads are closer to 5 minutes depending on what else is running. Save loads can depend on just how clustered and how large the map is, but I get fairly low map loads at my usual 300x300-350x350 moderately filled with things.

[Astasia]

I would guess you have bulky mods doing excessive patch related generation on load causing you to run out of RAM. Since the game is being built in RAM during this time once it starts trying to use virtual memory it's going to slow to a crawl. The game shouldn't be using that much memory, some mods do some really broken stuff to the game, inflate memory use and make the game take ages to load. Your best bet is to figure out which broken mods you are using and remove them. Theoretically increasing your RAM to 16-32GB might reduce load times on the same modlist from "30 minutes" down to something like 10-15 minutes (blind guess), assuming the issue is you are running out of RAM.

An SSD will do basically nothing to help, all of the game and mod assets are likely going to be less than 1gb, if you have a crazy amount of mods it will still probably be under 2gb, this takes seconds to load into memory. What the game is doing at launch is taking all the code and modded additions and patches, and merging it all together and "building the game from scratch" basically, this is mostly CPU based. A functional modlist will load in under 5 minutes though, even on an older CPU, even with 100-200 mods.

TLDR, your modlist is broken, treat it as a massive compatibility issue and start removing mods in chunks until you fix it. You might only have to remove a handful of problem mods total to get the game loading in a sane amount of time. Upgrading your PC hardware to try to fix broken mods just doesn't make sense.

[The Blind One]

yeah 8 gig ram isn't enough if you run a lot of big ram hungry mods.

You should run the game and go to the task manager and see if you run out of ram. If you are running out of ram (very likely) then you instantly know why it's taking so long to load.

Either buy more ram or rebuild your modlist without all the crazy mods.

[Valar_Morghulis]

I had 30Min wait time too until there was an update (can't remember when years ago prob)
turned it down to 20mins
Now i got an SSD 15mins
Clean Modlist 5mins
32GB Ram (feels faster but idk) 4minish

But cleaning the modlist and put it into a right order was the core thing to do.

[The Blind One]

Yeah there was a patch a while back that fixed a lot of the graphics being loaded when they weren't being used. It caused a massive drop in ram usage. I had a PC with 16 gigs and it ran out of ram with all the expanded series and other mods that it took about 5 minutes to load at a time. (11 years old clunker)

After the patch it took only a minute or two and the ram usage was massively reduced to maybe as much as 8ish gig of ram instead of 14ish. It really do help to optimize the load list aswell. Rimpy is a great help if you aren't well versed in it yourself. I don't allow rimpy to do my mod list not because it isn't good but because I want similar type of mods to remain in the same modlist area so I can quickly see what I have and don't have installed

[Jigain]

Originally posted by MerlinCross:

Originally posted by Jigain:

A better idea than buying an SSD would be to remove the broken mods from your mod list. None of those things are normal. Even heavily modded, with over 300+ mods, I don't think I've ever reached five minutes of load time, much less thirty hours. But of more concern would be the crashes and freezes before you even get into the game proper, that indicates you're running some extremely broken stuff. Just getting rid of broken mods might reduce your load times by more than 29 hours.

HAH HA.... probably me being stupid in how I organized it. Let's go with me being stupid.

At times I have anywhere from a 30 minute wait time loading the game UP to an Hour(as if the game hard crashes mid load or at title screen well have to try again). To me 30-Hour reads, 30 minutes up to an hour. But it wouldn't be the first time I confused people.

Well, it was quite a bit tongue in cheek, I can't imagine anyone thinking their RimWorld mod list is good enough to wait 30 hours just to get to the main menu.

Seriously though, your mod list is horribly broken. You really ought to go through it and strip down stuff you don't need or use. That's going to do much more for stability and load times than running Rocketman will. Because crashing is a bad, bad sign. A properly running RimWorld with no broken mods will never- well, okay, I shouldn't rule out the impossible but it should not crash 99.999% of the time you run it. If it's reproduceable on your system, even if it's with the "sometimes" label, something's horribly wrong. Which may, ultimately, end in worse outcomes such as corrupted save files.

[Kangaroo Salesman]

With around 410 mods it takes around 7-8 minutes to get to the main menu. I don't think an SSD will help much as it's more so the processor.

[--<[ Blei ]>--]

Originally posted by MerlinCross:

SSD - what's a good one?

screw brands and take the one with high read- and write values.
compare different SSDs if you have no clue.

[MerlinCross]

Originally posted by Steelfleece:

In theory, an i5-8400 should be roughly equal to my current rig, with an i7-4790k. Maybe even better than it. In that case, I'd definitely take a closer look at your mod list and ensure you need all those. My own list is...Shall we say, somewhat bloated, and its initial loads are closer to 5 minutes depending on what else is running. Save loads can depend on just how clustered and how large the map is, but I get fairly low map loads at my usual 300x300-350x350 moderately filled with things.

Save loads have never really been a problem for me and I run it at the default map size. It's the intial load of 20-30 minutes that has me just doing anything else while it figures out if it wants to load or not.

Originally posted by Astasia:

TLDR, your modlist is broken, treat it as a massive compatibility issue and start removing mods in chunks until you fix it. You might only have to remove a handful of problem mods total to get the game loading in a sane amount of time. Upgrading your PC hardware to try to fix broken mods just doesn't make sense.

It does when it seems it's a problem when throwing in even the smallest amount of content adding mods seems to make it load like a brick these days. As a test, I threw in a good chunk of Vanilla expanded(As it adds a lot of stuff but from the same person/group/team, hypothetically should work better than random mods from different people). Still decently bloated load time.

Combine this with other games I've had problems running due to simliar issues of long load or other hang up moments that take so much time to process; forgive me if at this point I'm thinking it's a hardware issue. Or maybe a driver issue. Or maybe something got damaged. But there feels like a bottle neck somewhere besides just "Fix mod list".

At this point I wonder if it's even worth it considering I've spent so much time trying to remove the long load time, I probably could have finished a colony or two by now(Though if it IS non mod issue, fixing it should be good across everything).

Originally posted by The Blind One:

yeah 8 gig ram isn't enough if you run a lot of big ram hungry mods.

You should run the game and go to the task manager and see if you run out of ram. If you are running out of ram (very likely) then you instantly know why it's taking so long to load.

Either buy more ram or rebuild your modlist without all the crazy mods.

Checking it with a couple different lists; Ram seems to cap up to 90% or so. Either as brief spikes, or just hanging these for a good while.

Looks like I'm buying Ram.

Originally posted by Kangaroo Salesman:

With around 410 mods it takes around 7-8 minutes to get to the main menu. I don't think an SSD will help much as it's more so the processor.

Barely go above 250 at most. What's your Ram at?

Originally posted by Jigain:

Seriously though, your mod list is horribly broken. You really ought to go through it and strip down stuff you don't need or use. That's going to do much more for stability and load times than running Rocketman will. Because crashing is a bad, bad sign. A properly running RimWorld with no broken mods will never- well, okay, I shouldn't rule out the impossible but it should not crash 99.999% of the time you run it. If it's reproduceable on your system, even if it's with the "sometimes" label, something's horribly wrong. Which may, ultimately, end in worse outcomes such as corrupted save files.

I've had rimworld crash before without mods or even just the lightest of mod lists so I've never put much stock in it crashing with the mod pack of 200 so mods I tend to run. Granted some of those crashes were months or even years ago so if you ask me what version it was, I couldn't tell you the patch it crashed on. And I've stripped it down, still takes a good 20 minutes.

The weirdest crashes are when it not only crashes but takes steam with it. I've had that happen to me on another game but I can't remember which one(I do remember getting a refund for that game though), so I just assume it was a hardware or memory issue like it was for that game which I BARELY met the specs of.

End of the day, looks like I'm upgrading my Ram.

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by MerlinCross:

End of the day, looks like I'm upgrading my Ram.

And, what about culling some of the 250 mods you're running? Why not do that, first?

You said you're using a modpack... Do you mean you're using a recommended mod list that someone put together?

If so, be advised those are usually crap and, even if they were mostly "OK'ish," are the usual source of players having mods get deprecated by a patch while not knowing what mod is no longer compatible since the creator of "Happyjoy Pebble Texture#34" died and can no longer steward their ancient mod...

Cull your mods. Go through them and cull out the ones that are either bloated or just plain badly conceived.

Or, just keep adding RAM? After all, if you add some more RAM, you could probably have even more mods! win/win/lose