(Singleplayer) Do foundations cause lag? Or: Are pillar bases better somehow?

[EmberStar]

I've been watching some "builder" videos to try to come up with some bases that are better than ♥♥♥♥♥♥ cobblestone Borg Cubes. And I've hit several now where the video maker lays out a floor plan with foundations, then deletes them all and replaces them with ceilings on pillars. If anything at all is said about this, it's just "and I removed the foundations to help with lag."

Is this actually a thing? Do foundations cause some kind of crashing or lag or memory leak or something?

*Edited to correct some egregious typos.*

[steventirey]

Looking online, there never has been a thing a foundation lag. At least, no more than any other building piece. It may have started when some people believed foundations had an added script or other function (related to stability), and more foundations meant more functions running meant more slowdown. But it seems like that was never true in the first place.

That being said, the more placeable objects you have in an area, the more it will impact your game, and can cause lag. Some objects, like torches, impact it more than others.

[Jaq]

The lore is that at one time in the game's development, certain foundations were very poorly optimized and required a disproportionate amount of server power to process. The new canon is that's no longer the case. I don't know for certain whether either part of that story is true, but I still use as few foundations as possible on PVE servers because they're ugly and overused.

[Multigun]

"Do Foundations Cause Lag"

No more then any other building piece out there. This is one of the worse false rumors that has persisted for way too long. There is ZERO evidence to support this claim. If you break it down logically, it makes the rumor (I'm putting it very nicely) look even worse. Anybody with actual game dev background or even an IT background involving SQL database can explain why (I'm not going to, because I've done it far too many times).

No, no, and no. Anybody who tells you to build with MORE building pieces that a foundation would cover is flat out wrong and is causing far more performance costs.

[Muu]

Originally posted by steventirey:

Looking online, there never has been a thing a foundation lag.

Completely false.

Pillars are definitely the way to go if you want to reduce performance drain. Now days I dont even use foundations at all. Just 1 pillar as the starting point then build floors and add more pillars as you go.

If you dont believe me because you cant find a reddit post telling you so, try it out for yourself. Build a 10x10 foundation house and monitor your FPS when walking around it in render distance. Then try it with pillars.

The top 3 things that destroy FPS:
1. Lighting (I recommend standing tiki torch, you need less of them to light more of your base.)
2. Furniture (Especially animated assets. Avoid placing down cups and plates on tables, each one kills FPS)
3. Foundations (Always use pillars and if your build's stability allows it, add spaces between pillars. The less pieces you use that connect your base to the terrain, the less performance drain. Obviously not optimal for PVP.)

[Multigun]

Originally posted by Princess Muu-Muu:

Completely false.

Pillars are definitely the way to go if you want to reduce performance drain. Now days I dont even use foundations at all. Just 1 pillar as the starting point then build floors and add more pillars as you go.

(Facepalms). As I said, this is one of the worse false rumors that has persisted for way too long. And this is why.

I would explain the differences between client performance, and server performance, and how the "test" Princess believes is 100000% ironclad is stupidly subjective based on a bunch of factors (number of materials and render calls, number of polygons and how every ceiling and foundation in conan have a different number and is not AT ALL even remotely possible to be identical in every scenario like Princess's ironclad test suggests, whats in view and what isn't, how buildings in conan use instancing and how that benefits both client and server performance, and on and on).

And most importantly, their ironclad test is extremely confirmation bias based (and a very typical type thing to say. This happened, so therefore, my reasoning is right. No need to actually dig into it and learn something.) But I know better not to try. Cause they would rather plug their ears then listen to actual hard evidence.

At the end of the day, if you want to INSIST, despite all the evidence in the world, "foundations cause the most lag out of anything in the game" and make your build more complicated and hurt your own performance, go for it I suppose.

[DarkFire]

My current base has ~14K foundation blocks (yes really 14K, I filled in one of the northern valleys) which produces <1 fps loss. I would suggest that if the supposed foundation lag ever did exist, it no longer does, so feel free to build whatever you want.

[Weffi]

foundations do not cause lag, but they can drop your fps hard if someone has used a lot of foundations for a huge build.

[EmberStar]

Okay, watching a few of the videos again, and one of the newer ones addressed it again. The comment in the newer one was that the builder chose to use "ceilings and pillars" because they use the Corner Trick to put pillars on the corners / edges of walls to add visual "depth" to the build. Nothing mentioned about lag, just that foundations won't play nice with pillars when using them that way.