Known sources of lag?

[SkyfishArt]

Hello, I play on a big multiplayer server (vintage story civilization) and a lot of people are making a lot of assumption about what causes lag in the game, especially based on prior experience with minecraft. So I'm wondering, is there actually some information on what is expected and known to cause lag in game? Things people are assuming causes lag are the following:
Too many animals crammed in a small pit, a high density of chiseled blocks, many players in the same chunk, running on path blocks, talking with proximity voice mods, boats.

Reading on the performance page, I see that leaf blocks in particular is mentioned. But I would wonder if something like "having a lot of storage items" or "many mechanical windmill parts" could also be sources of lag.

It would be good to know what kind of things are known to decrease performance so we can encourage players to work around it, for example by killing animals in pits down to a reasonable level.

Edited November 26, 2025 by SkyfishArt
spelling fixes

[Professor Dragon]

Hello @SkyfishArt

I would be guessing too much here as to what might be the lag in your case. 
Even if we had more details, such as the number of concurrent players, the settings, the network etc etc.

So I think rather than engaging in more of the speculation, start at this page and follow the suggestions.
Then upload the logs as the page suggests so that the actual data is looked at:
https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Debugging_Performance_Issues

Professor Dragon.

 

[SkyfishArt]

I am not looking to troubleshoot this server, I am not the server owner, I am only a player on it.

I am looking for information about "Known limitations" of vanilla vintage story, what kind of things in vanilla vintage story should a player keep limited.
For example in minecraft, it is common knowledge that there exists a mob cap globally, and that many animals reduce performance, so it makes sense to cull animals if you get performance drop near big animal pits. But no one seems to know if this example is true for vintage story, everyone is just assuming that it works the same.

This is a problem, because players will be requesting we "stop chieseling so damn much" as an example, so that they "don't crash" when entering a city, but no one actually has any basis for blaming chiseled blocks for performance, no one has knowledge enough to read crash logs, so unless the developers state things about it or that there is common knowledge within the vintage story about what kind of things affect performance and what not, then it remains speculation.

[Professor Dragon]

1 hour ago, SkyfishArt said:

I am not looking to troubleshoot this server, I am not the server owner, I am only a player on it.

I am looking for information about "Known limitations" of vanilla vintage story, what kind of things in vanilla vintage story should a player keep limited.
For example in minecraft, it is common knowledge that there exists a mob cap globally, and that many animals reduce performance, so it makes sense to cull animals if you get performance drop near big animal pits. But no one seems to know if this example is true for vintage story, everyone is just assuming that it works the same.

This is a problem, because players will be requesting we "stop chieseling so damn much" as an example, so that they "don't crash" when entering a city, but no one actually has any basis for blaming chiseled blocks for performance, no one has knowledge enough to read crash logs, so unless the developers state things about it or that there is common knowledge within the vintage story about what kind of things affect performance and what not, then it remains speculation.

I can see where you're going . . . but this is really dependent on so many variables, that I don't think there is a good answer.
We could answer "Lots of mods" or "Poor mod" or "Lots of chiselling" or "Too many chunks loaded" or "Insufficient hardware" or "GPU glitch" - but none of this might be right for your scenario. You could go down the Performance checklist with the same issue.

For example, yes, large numbers of chiselled blocks can cause lag . . . but how many? On what type of system - both server and client and network? With what mods loaded? 
Mods like Better Ruins, which have a large number of special blocks, can cause issues. But it is really dependent on the hardware - both client and server, what other players are doing and so on. What might be horrendous for some people may run just perfectly fine under different circumstances.

If you want an idea of what other people have reported as causing performance issues, you can check the Issue Tracker and put in a keyword such as "Performance":
https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aanegostudios%2FVintageStory-Issues+performance&type=issues

In practical terms, I recommend that you ask people who "experience lag" to document exactly what they mean (because "lag" means different things to different people), and have them take it to the server admins. Then the server admins - if they don't know - can take it to the Issue Tracker and get the exact root cause. No guessing - take a specific scenario and troubleshoot that.

I'm sure someone else will chime in on this thread.

Professor Dragon.

 

 

 

[LadyWYT]

Honestly, have to agree with @Professor Dragon here, in that there are just too many variables to account for. As a general rule, Vintage Story is optimized very well, and the vanilla game should run excellent on the average machine. Sometimes there's a bug or two that throws a wrench in the works, but those are usually sorted out fairly fast.

4 hours ago, SkyfishArt said:

I am looking for information about "Known limitations" of vanilla vintage story, what kind of things in vanilla vintage story should a player keep limited.

For vanilla specifically, it's going to depend on player hardware. Weaker hardware will want to turn down graphics, which usually equates to lowering render distance, lowering particle counts, lowering shadow quality, etc. It's also a good idea to keep background tasks to a minimum while playing, as they can also interfere with game performance(especially on weaker hardware).

Having lots of signs, machine parts, a ridiculous amount of entities crammed into a small location, lots of intricate chiseling, etc, can all possibly impact performance, but I would say that's really only a concern for weaker hardware, and like...a TON of that stuff packed into one's base. I would also say that's a general rule for most games, not just Minecraft or Vintage Story. The more you have going on in a single space, the more the system is going to need to work to account for it all.

It's also worth keeping in mind that for multiplayer specifically, spotty internet connection can easily cause issues while playing, although connection issues typically come with a warning box appearing in the upper right hand corner. Likewise, the bigger the server is, the beefier it will need to be in order to handle a large map with lots of players.

4 hours ago, SkyfishArt said:

This is a problem, because players will be requesting we "stop chieseling so damn much" as an example, so that they "don't crash" when entering a city, but no one actually has any basis for blaming chiseled blocks for performance, no one has knowledge enough to read crash logs, so unless the developers state things about it or that there is common knowledge within the vintage story about what kind of things affect performance and what not, then it remains speculation.

Honestly...it sounds like those players might just have lower-end PCs, and/or be running other programs in the background that may impact their performance specifically. Having browser tabs open, playing music, or recording game footage can all be fairly demanding on system resources. However, it's also possible that they're trying to play the game at higher settings than what their hardware can handle, and thus are encountering problems as a result. If it is a hardware problem though, I'm not sure there's much that can be done, outside of tinkering with graphics to find something more workable or upgrading hardware(if possible). While it may not be fun to do that, it's also not really fair to force other players to avoid chiseling or otherwise reasonably enjoying the game just because the hardware of other players can't handle it.

That being said...despite it being a vanilla server, it's worth checking to see if the players having problems are using client-side mods. If they are, it's entirely possible that there's a mod causing issues(especially if the mod is out of date and not otherwise known to work correctly on the latest game version), in which case they should try disabling their mods to see if performance improves.

If you've got logs available, you could also try posting them here on the forums to see if someone else can figure them out. If it's an actual crash report though, you can post that to the forums too, but that's much better submitted to the Github bug tracker for the devs to see.