Okay, I tried it again just now with a new game. I set Opacity to nothing and set the frame limit to 30 fps. Starting the game immediately results in one core going 100% utilization.
I also noticed, since I didn't have it muted anymore, that the sound stutters when it's in the background. I am using hardware acceleration, AFAIK.
I'm playing the version here on the web interface on Firefox 158.0.1 on Linux Mint 22.3. Laptop is a Thinkpad T15 with 16 GB of RAM, CPU is an i7-1165G7 (~2020). So, old, but not that old.
It was late at night and early in the game, so I put 1 CPU on drone recovery and 1 CPU on refinery efficiency and went to bed. I got up and the one was done and the other was level 12, and I continued playing. But I noticed that the laptop fan was going. I think I'd just gotten to Fusion Drive but didn't have any modules developed yet except Medium Hull. I checked and it was Firefox capping out CPU on one core. I saved and quit to the menu, and it stopped. Reloading the game capped it out again. At this point it's like the year 3,000 in the game, and the days are ticking by in jumps of 20 to 30 days a tick, but nothing else is faster. It's just that date clock accelerating. I don't know if that's intended, but since nothing else sped up it was strange.
I kept playing until I got to the point of creating relays, and it never stopped maxing the core it was running on, and eventually years were ticking by faster than days at the start of the game. That's when I made the above comment. Maybe it's something as simple as no frame rate limit set?
Unfortunately, I didn't see the warning about saved games getting nuked so I didn't export the save or I would link it.
I really like the idea, but connecting machines is frustrating and unintuitive. Since that's the core of the game at least in the first few minutes, that the impression the game gives.
The game acts like connecting and organizing the machines is important, but then it's incredibly particular about exactly how you draw the connections. Making new connections fails easily, there's no indication about why they did. Is there a limit on the number of connections? Is there a rule for the conveyors? There's no indication of either. The geometry that the game interprets from a simple drag and drop is completely arbitrary. It's comedic how bizarrely it interprets the stroke of a mouse. If there are link points or anchors you're supposed to draw through, you can't see them.
You can pretty easily make connection by moving two machines adjacent to each other and drawing between them, and then moving them back where you want them to be. And doing that preserves the connection. But if that's the intent, why make me draw anything in the first place? What's this mechanic doing?
It's especially frustrating because if you're in connection drawing or redrawing mode and there's an error, it doesn't let you try again. Instead, you're kicked out completely. You have to select the machine or conveyor again, click the Connect or Redraw Connection button again, and then you can try again. So it's not just click and drag, click and drag, click and drag to try something out. No, no. It's click click click click and drag, click click click click and drag, click click click click and drag. It adds a lot of friction and is frustrating, but without it I'm not sure what I'm really doing as the player here.
