I’ve spent the last few days building out a pretty extensive automation setup, and I’m running into some frustrating limitations that I’m hoping others might have insight into.
Current setup includes:
- Large AFK mob farm connected to a centralized kill zone
- Loot routing system with full gear filtering + scrapping duplicates
- Dedicated farms for:
- All wood types
- 11 crop types (one per crop)
- All ore types (with smelting)
- Centralized sorting into categorized storage (ore, wood, fiber, keys, building materials, etc.)
Everything is interconnected and designed to run simultaneously, and I’ve spent a lot of time iterating on layouts to improve efficiency and reduce lag/rendering issues.
The problem:
- Systems stop functioning properly when I move ~50–70 tiles away
- Robot arm filtering becomes unreliable outside that range
- The commonly mentioned render distance (~200+ tiles) doesn’t seem to match what I’m experiencing
- When I return to the mob farm, enemies/turrets appear to “dump” actions all at once (e.g. fire moths/sentries overwhelming galaxite turrets instantly)
I’ve tested:
- Multiple layout redesigns to reduce complexity
- Spreading systems out vs. compact builds
- Isolating individual systems (they work fine up close, but fail at distance)
Questions:
Is there a confirmed functional render distance for automation (not just visual rendering)?
Are robot arms and other automation systems intended to stop working beyond a certain range?
Could the number of active processes within range affect simulation distance?
Are there any known optimization strategies for large, interconnected systems like this?
Has anyone successfully built a large-scale “always-on” automation setup?
I don’t mind limitations if they’re intentional, but right now it’s hard to tell whether this is a design constraint, performance issue, or something I’m doing wrong.
Would really appreciate any insight or examples of setups that work reliably at scale.