Terrible stuttering/lag spikes on mac m3

[Boris Tseitlin]

Hi, new player here.

I am playing 1.21 on a Mac M3 and experiencing lag spikes. It seems to happen more when exploring (chunks loading), but also happens seemingly at random. 

I tried the official FPS guide and fiddling with graphics settings, but can't figure it out. I see in console that some frames take up to 1 sec to load. So the game actually freezes at some points even though it's pretty smooth overall.

Can anyone suggest a reliable way to pinpoint the problem?

[Echo Weaver]

3 hours ago, Boris Tseitlin said:

I am playing 1.21 on a Mac M3 and experiencing lag spikes.

Yeah, there's something going on with .Net 8.

Take a look a this thread and try the solution linked at the end: 

It worked for me on my M3.

 

[Boris Tseitlin]

 

15 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

Yeah, there's something going on with .Net 8.

Take a look a this thread and try the solution linked at the end: 

It worked for me on my M3.

 

Thanks! 

Yes, garbage collection sounds like something that could be causing it. Spiky in nature, semi-random, more present when a lot of stuff is loading.

I will try the fix and report

 

UPD: It worked! Thanks!

Edited September 15, 2025 by Boris Tseitlin

[Flakeinator]

So I tried this on my M4 Mac and it worked at first but now the game hard locks instead with the changes. I have to Force Quit vintage story. If I undo the changes, revert to backup file, I get the lag spikes instead but the game won’t hard lock. Not sure what to do about it.

[Echo Weaver]

12 hours ago, Flakeinator said:

So I tried this on my M4 Mac and it worked at first but now the game hard locks instead with the changes. I have to Force Quit vintage story. If I undo the changes, revert to backup file, I get the lag spikes instead but the game won’t hard lock. Not sure what to do about it.

Wow. The hanging happens regularly? 

I'm on an M3, and the official update didn't fix all my freezing problems. I had to go back to the Github thread, check the config settings against the ones proposed there, and put back one line that the official update did not have. That caused a noticeable improvement, so I don't think the devs have found the whole issue.

I did enter one area where the game hung twice when I tried to knapp an axe, so I'm just not going there anymore. 

FWIW, those two hangups appeared to be related to autosave, but I didn't see anything obvious about the area that would cause problems. It might be that all the stuttering is from autosave. 

Edited September 30, 2025 by Echo Weaver

[Flakeinator]

5 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

Wow. The hanging happens regularly? 

I'm on an M3, and the official update didn't fix all my freezing problems. I had to go back to the Github thread, check the config settings against the ones proposed there, and put back one line that the official update did not have. That caused a noticeable improvement, so I don't think the devs have found the whole issue.

I did enter one area where the game hung twice when I tried to knapp an axe, so I'm just not going there anymore. 

FWIW, those two hangups appeared to be related to autosave, but I didn't see anything obvious about the area that would cause problems. It might be that all the stuttering is from autosave. 

Maybe. The funny part is that it worked for an hour or so on the new world before it finally froze on me. I force quit the game and when I went back to load the file it say that it hadn't been played at all. I panicked for a minute or so but it loaded my save. Not sure what is going on but I am trying again. I downloaded the file from GitHub and renamed it. I will see what happens when I play next. Maybe something was odd with my file. I also removed the "backup" that I was keeping in the same folder so many that was part of the issue too. Two files with the same name but different extensions in the folder.

 

I guess it could be related to a mod as well but not sure. I will still play even with the lag/stuttering if I need to before the full fix is done by the dev team.