Oxygen Not Included should perform a lot better with the latest update

While Oxygen Not Included is one of my favourite games to come out in the last year, it did have a few performance issues here and there which the latest update should hopefully solve.

Klei Entertainment don't just make interesting games, they support them for a long time too. Oxygen Not Included left Early Access back in July and the first big post-release update landed last week to improve the experience for everyone. Klei said they did a "big performance pass and removed a lot of spikes, leading to a smoother experience in every colony we tested". They also worked on some new profiling tools to help them track down performance issues, which is what helped with this update.

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Some of the highlights from this update include:

• Improve performance updating the Build menu
• Improve performance updating which categories and buildings have been unlocked by research
• Improved performance updating world navigation data.
• Improved performance for updating animation render groups.
• Optimized the way achievements track stats on buildings, e.g. temperature, building type, and so on. Removes significant performance spikes across frames.
• Improved performance when many items are marked for sweep and drawing their sweep icon.
• Improved performance when animations are rendered with offset positions. This has an especially big impact on rocket launches, which are now much smoother.
• Large optimization to the way textures are loaded and freed, improves many colonies.
• Cost of calculating whether materials are available for delivery is spread out over multiple frames, to prevent a spike every second.

The list goes on for a while, those are just some of what jumped out to me when looking over for times where I know my own worlds have had a bit of a blip. Going back to one of my rather large colonies today, it was ridiculously smooth compared to what it was before. I mean, it wasn't terrible before but now it's great.

While I do highly recommend it, there's currently one little issue in the Linux version. The tutorial helper videos are black, which is likely due to Klei using the wrong codecs for the videos in the Linux version. Same issue I've come across in multiple other games, as they need to use something like webm which works across Windows, MacOS and Linux. I've let Klei know about this, something the Unity game engine should probably handle better.

Klei also teased that work on something much bigger is in progress, as they said they're "busy crafting the next phase of Oxygen Not Included".

You can find it on Steam.