u/toropippi

I made a performance mod that speeds up large-colony simulation by ~1.5x

I made a mod that improves one of Timberborn’s weak points: simulation speed in large late-game colonies.

On my large test colony, I measured roughly 1.5x to 2.4x the vanilla tick rate.

However, even after making the simulation itself faster, the frame rate could still remain heavily affected. So I also implemented a mode that reduces the CPU cost of animations, making it possible to play at around 30 FPS even on heavy saves.

The attached video was recorded on the same heavy colony in a fixed 30 FPS mode. This means the difference shown is not just a higher FPS counter. The simulation itself is progressing faster, while the frame rate is no longer being sacrificed as much.

What it optimizes

Per-entity ticking: virtual-call-heavy object loops → flatter batched dispatch

Harvest searches for farms and similar systems: repeated scans → segment tree

Event dispatch: dynamic handler resolution → precompiled delegates

Hot-path allocations / boxing: reduced heap churn and GC pressure

Pathfinding / travel-time estimates: cached and reused where safe

The goal is to reduce the CPU cost per tick while keeping colony behavior exactly the same as vanilla.

Important notes

Please turn V-Sync off.

There may still be bugs, so please back up any important save files before testing.

I do not currently have a save with more than 1,000 beavers, so if you are running a very large colony, especially one with multi-level farms or large forestry areas, I would really appreciate it if you could try this mod and let me know how much of a difference it makes on your save.

Steam Workshop:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3756656421

Implementation was AI(Fable5)-assisted, then tested against vanilla behavior.

u/toropippi — 21 hours ago