# What was the Reason for the 1sec turns?

**URL:** <https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/what-was-the-reason-for-the-1sec-turns/20862>\
**Category:** The Garage\
**Created:** [July 23, 2019, 4:25am UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/what-was-the-reason-for-the-1sec-turns/20862 "2019-07-23T04:25:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 14\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![dpwb](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.cataclysmdda.org/dpwb/32/2609_2.png) [@dpwb](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/dpwb)\
**Post date:** [July 23, 2019, 7:57pm UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/what-was-the-reason-for-the-1sec-turns/20862/21 "2019-07-23T19:57:24Z")

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Yeah I lost count at around 100,000 perishable food items, walking around and examining the stacks.

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**Author:** ![ppanda0421](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/49beb7/32.png) [@ppanda0421](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/ppanda0421)\
**Post date:** [July 23, 2019, 8:06pm UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/what-was-the-reason-for-the-1sec-turns/20862/22 "2019-07-23T20:06:23Z")

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Haha, Ok i stand corrected. If I’m wrong I’m not afraid to admit it. I’m sorry for blaming everything on the 1 sec turn :). However I am somewhat confused. Like I said earlier, in a previous game I had about 5x more items than this within the same area. For instance in 1 stack I had 800000 herbs/spice. 10s of thousands of all the grains and over 100 animals. Though I didn’t have as many fridges before and none were on the 2nd level of my evac shelter. Oh and my farms in my old game were about 3x to 5x as big. So you can understand my confusion. More items before, less items now but now slower.

Nevertheless thanks for looking into it. Perhaps my savegame can help you guys optimize things even further.

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**Author:** ![ppanda0421](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/49beb7/32.png) [@ppanda0421](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/ppanda0421)\
**Post date:** [July 23, 2019, 8:11pm UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/what-was-the-reason-for-the-1sec-turns/20862/23 "2019-07-23T20:11:52Z")

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That is what everyone brought up (in here and other forums) when talking about time issues and so I believed what they concluded.

I’ll try disabling Z-levels. Thanks.

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**Author:** ![Erk](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.cataclysmdda.org/erk/32/3871_2.png) [@Erk](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/Erk)\
**Post date:** [July 23, 2019, 8:12pm UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/what-was-the-reason-for-the-1sec-turns/20862/24 "2019-07-23T20:12:39Z")

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It seems unlikely that all of what you had before was fitting into the reality bubble at once. Also those fridges are pretty processor intensive, I’d guess more intensive than large stacks of nonperishable items.

It is, however, entirely possible that something here is taking too much processor power due to a change recently. I’m sure if that’s the case, Kevin will know pretty soon.

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**Author:** ![Mantar](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.cataclysmdda.org/mantar/32/42_2.png) [@Mantar](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/Mantar)\
**Post date:** [July 23, 2019, 8:21pm UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/what-was-the-reason-for-the-1sec-turns/20862/25 "2019-07-23T20:21:35Z")

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> [@dpwb](#):
>
> if you were travelling in a car at 40mph, you would travel like 100 in-game meters before you had a chance to turn the car to avoid an obstacle

I’d like to point out as a side-note that higher driving skill gives you a shorter wait before you get another chance to turn. Having played characters with 4 driving and 10 driving, I saw a very noticeable difference when navigating city streets at speed. I could thread a needle at 10, while 4 was having difficulty with not running into things.

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**Author:** ![kevin.granade](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.cataclysmdda.org/kevin.granade/32/1316_2.png) [@kevin.granade](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/kevin.granade)\
**Post date:** [July 24, 2019, 5:14am UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/what-was-the-reason-for-the-1sec-turns/20862/26 "2019-07-24T05:14:00Z")

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Little update, I got a chance to run your save in a profiler.  
Your game is spending about 90% of its time on NPCs looking for either explosives or corpses to smash. One of the other developers came up with an idea for optimizing this with some caching, if it works as I expect it should speed your game up by about 10x.  
After that I’ll check if there are any other opportunities for optimization, which is very likely.

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**Author:** ![ppanda0421](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/49beb7/32.png) [@ppanda0421](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/ppanda0421)\
**Post date:** [July 24, 2019, 5:39am UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/what-was-the-reason-for-the-1sec-turns/20862/27 "2019-07-24T05:39:59Z")

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Hi,

Thanks for looking into this further! Looking forward to further changes/optimizations to make my game (and others) smoother.

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**Author:** ![Malkeus](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.cataclysmdda.org/malkeus/32/12037_2.png) [@Malkeus](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/Malkeus)\
**Post date:** [July 24, 2019, 5:47am UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/what-was-the-reason-for-the-1sec-turns/20862/28 "2019-07-24T05:47:05Z")

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> [@druidniam](#):
>
> > [@dpwb](#):
> >
> > 6- seconds was a weird arbitrary number
> 
> Actually 6 second turns has it’s roots in the original Dungeons and Dragons, where a round was defined as 6 seconds. Quite a few games over the years have used this as the basis for their timers.

That works well in DnD, mostly because when you play a round in DnD you typically describe a series of actions all happening sequentially.  
“I step up to the zombie and slash at him with my sword.” or “I duck under the punch while drawing my dagger and stab at the baddy.” are examples I’ve used in a game of DnD. It’s up to your rolls and your DM whether you succeed or not and you get called out if you try to cram too much into those 6 seconds.  
Again, that works well in a tabletop environment bc of the human element. It doesn’t work as well on a rigid PC where something like walking up to a zombie and attacking it used to take upwards of 12 seconds (more if you had a low speed weapon and/or encumbrance). I support the change to 1 second turns. It’s just going to take some time to, first, figure out all the side effects of the change and, second, resolve the issue. This will be a good thing in the long run, just be patient with things in the interim.

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**Author:** ![ppanda0421](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/49beb7/32.png) [@ppanda0421](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/ppanda0421)\
**Post date:** [July 24, 2019, 6:04am UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/what-was-the-reason-for-the-1sec-turns/20862/29 "2019-07-24T06:04:35Z")

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Ok another update. I just disabled Z-levels and continued on with the game and it messed up my animals’ locations. They follow you when you go between z-levels even when tied. They moved by themselves and pushed one another all over the place between the basement and main floor of the evac shelter even though they are ‘tied’ down.

So I guess disabling Z-levels after enabling them is a not a good idea when you have animals nearby…

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**Author:** ![kevin.granade](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.cataclysmdda.org/kevin.granade/32/1316_2.png) [@kevin.granade](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/kevin.granade)\
**Post date:** [July 24, 2019, 7:55am UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/what-was-the-reason-for-the-1sec-turns/20862/30 "2019-07-24T07:55:50Z")

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Z-levels aren’t the primary cause anyway, though it certainly doesn’t help.  
PR greatly improving the situation is up:

> <https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/32588>

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**Author:** ![Dredd501](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.cataclysmdda.org/dredd501/32/5092_2.png) [@Dredd501](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/Dredd501)\
**Post date:** [July 24, 2019, 6:35pm UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/what-was-the-reason-for-the-1sec-turns/20862/31 "2019-07-24T18:35:05Z")

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Frikkin sweet  
Thanks Kev 😊

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Malkeus](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.cataclysmdda.org/malkeus/32/12037_2.png) [@Malkeus](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/Malkeus)\
**Post date:** [July 24, 2019, 7:28pm UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/what-was-the-reason-for-the-1sec-turns/20862/32 "2019-07-24T19:28:59Z")

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> [@kevin.granade](#):
>
> To test, spawn unconscionable numbers of active items and some friendly NPCs, then just wait around for a while.

Lol! I can’t wait, I need the speed!

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**Author:** ![kuros](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.cataclysmdda.org/kuros/32/1788_2.png) [@kuros](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/kuros)\
**Post date:** [July 24, 2019, 11:13pm UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/what-was-the-reason-for-the-1sec-turns/20862/33 "2019-07-24T23:13:07Z")

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I would like to take a second here to express my utter amazement at how quickly the team got into this and started generating solutions.

This kind of response to reasonable feedback is why I stick to this game.

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**Author:** ![Zhilkin](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.cataclysmdda.org/zhilkin/32/3749_2.png) [@Zhilkin](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/Zhilkin)\
**Post date:** [July 25, 2019, 8:36am UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/what-was-the-reason-for-the-1sec-turns/20862/34 "2019-07-25T08:36:20Z")

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It is easy to work when you have something to work with (i.e. savegame to profile). When people just ranting without savegame and/or reproduce steps - it leads nowhere.

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