Performance

Overview

This section will describe some things you can do, mods you can use, and best practices to make sure that Sim Settlements runs well on your system.

General Practices

Sim Settlements uses a method to create it's buildings that bypasses your building limit meter for the most part, this can be both a blessing and a curse. While it allows you to get highly detailed settlements built without needing any special mods or tricks to increase your build limit, the build limit in general was designed to prevent your system from crashing.

Also, because Sim Settlements uses an upgrade system that results in your buildings creating more polygon-intensive models over time, your frame-rate may be lower after returning later on.

With that in mind, here are some things you can try if you find that your framerate drops really low or your game crashes when hanging out in settlements with a lot of Sim Settlement structures.

• Create yourself a fast travel point that is near the edge of your settlement and facing away from it. You can build this mat under Resources -> Miscellaneous (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fast_travel_target) This will reduce the amount of things your game needs to render the moment you arrive.
• Try changing Upgrades to Manual. While this isn't the most fun of options, it may help with stability on lower end systems, as you get to individually choose which of your plots upgrade once they are eligible so you can see what effect that building upgrade has on your framerate.
• Limit your plot count to a smaller number to start and add more slowly. This will give you more control over how many new polygons are added to your settlement.
• Avoid the High Definition Texture pack from Bethesda. Almost all of the Sim Settlements buildings use the Fallout textures, which means that they will be updated to the very high resolution textures provided by that pack.

PC Specific

• Try reducing your graphic settings one stage lower. While the default game may work good on Ultra Settings for you, Sim Settlements is creating much more complex models than the default game does for your settlements - so the same settings may not work well for you.

Xbox Specific

• Try to limit your plot count to around 35 max in any given settlement. Beyond this and your Xbox will not be able to handle the load. If you aren't using any other non-plot objects, or have disabled all of the performance options as described below, you may be able to push beyond this.

Performance Options

As of patch 1.1.9 a Performance Options section exists in the City Manager 2078 Holotape. These options allow you to disable certain object types from being spawned from most plots. At the time of this writing, their are 8 types of objects you can disable via the performance options. (Note that none of these options are applied to the VIP homes, where the object types are key to VIP meaning anything - VIPs are rare, so they should have minimal overall impact).

• Detailed Models - This will disable complex models, and if possible, replace them with lower polygon versions.
• Detailed Lights - [High Impact] This will disable non-primary building lights. These are lights with shadows, or smaller lights meant to add more detail as opposed to the primary lights which are meant to help you see the building at night.
• Animated Objects - This will disable animated models, and if possible, replace them with static versions.
• Special Effects - [High Impact] This will disable things like smoke and fire.
• Radio - This will disable objects that play the radio stations.
• Sound Emitter - This will disable objects that play some sort of looping sound effect.
• Actors - This will disable pets and extra NPCs created as part of the building plan.
• Clutter - [High Impact] This will disable the settlers non-furniture belongings as well as the randomized clutter.