Is your house/keep/lair too laggy to bear, but no one else seems to be having issues? Chances are it's localized (client) lag. Minecraft's vanilla engine isn't that efficient, and once you pile a bunch of random mods on top of it, things can become unplayable. In no particular order, we're going to be collecting a list of known lag-makers from all our mods, so you can know what best practices to follow, and what items to avoid. 1: Reduce number of "loose" items Lots of loose items can cause lag as your computer struggles to render them - whether they be floating on the ground, travelling through pipes, or sitting in a crystal chest. Avoid Crystal Chests from the Iron Chests mod Crystal chests have the same inventory size as the diamond and obsidian chests from this mod - the only thing that's special about them is that you can see some of the stuff inside them. While it's kind of a cute feature, if it's contributing to your inability to play, you might consider replacing them. I'll happily replace a crystal chest with its equivalent for you (for free with my magic admin powers), and I'm sure other admins would help you out, too, so you don't lose any resources. Avoid breaking a lot of blocks at once This is pretty obvious, but sometimes it might happen unexpectedly. Examples to avoid would be spamming the IC2 mining laser on scatter mode, or using an axe on a very large tree (like a Twilight Forest canopy tree). If you break so many blocks in such a random pattern, you might lag yourself out and be unable to pick them up quickly. Choose Redpower tubes instead of Buildcraft pipes when moving items Buildcraft pipes can become overloaded and spill their items onto the ground if their destination cannot receive the items. Redpower tubes do not overflow; instead they will halt until the destination has room to receive again. Redpower tubes will move (and render) a stack of the same item as a single item, while Buildcraft will move (and render) each block individually. 2: Optimize your contraptions Buffer instead of streaming When feeding items into/through your pipe/tube system, you want to send identical items together so they will merge into a stack to reduce the rendering load. For example, if you are pulling from a machine that outputs one item at a time, you would want to let the items build up in a buffer of some sort and then, on a timer, be pulled out in stacks all at once. The Tubestuff mod actually includes a very[ smart buffer block that will handle all this functionality for you (and it can also convert between RP tubes and BC pipes!)
Crystal Chests from the Iron Chests mod Lots of loose items can cause lag as your computer struggles to render them - whether they be floating on the ground, travelling through pipes, or sitting in a crystal chest. Crystal chests have the same inventory size as the diamond and obsidian chests from this mod - the only thing that's special about them is that you can see some of the stuff inside them. While it's kind of a cute feature, if it's contributing to your inability to play, you might consider replacing them. I'll happily replace a crystal chest with its equivalent for you (for free with my magic admin powers), and I'm sure other admins would help you out, too, so you don't lose any resources.
I have 4 on my mining platform you can replace if you want. Just don't nuke the useful stuff in the boxes.
Choose Redpower tubes instead of Buildcraft pipes when moving items Buildcraft pipes can become overloaded and spill their items onto the ground if their destination cannot receive the items. Redpower tubes do not overflow; instead they will halt until the destination has room to receive again. Redpower tubes will move (and render) a stack of the same item as a single item, while Buildcraft will move (and render) each block individually. Buffer instead of streaming When feeding items into/through your pipe or tube system, you want to send identical items together so they will merge into a stack to reduce the rendering load. For example, if you are pulling from a machine that outputs one item at a time, you would want to let the items build up in a buffer of some sort and then, on a timer, be pulled out in stacks all at once. The Tubestuff mod actually includes a very smart buffer block that will handle all this functionality for you (and it can also convert between RP tubes and BC pipes!) I'm going to collect a list of client settings tweaks that can improve performance, these'll be on it!
