If I'm not mistaken, the experimental version is currently the exact same as the release one, so no downfall but no benefit here ^^

I'm not sure if that Vulkan mod is worth it, the main issue of this game is that it pushes the limits of the engine it is built on, not rendering.

Personnaly, I stopped using anything not listed in the description of this mod. The mesh updater seemed like a good idea but I encountered crashes using it.
I almost never switch between characters that are far away and I avoid using anything above x10 if I can.

Nothing can be done to have a loadless and smooth experience here, you can have huge battles without any issue, but travelling will always cause some heavy loading and unloading, especially with those 700 mods.

I leave the "fast zone hopping" option ticked off as it seems to reduce the general performance even with good hardware and I use the mods listed in the description, that is pretty much it.

Travel load times are faster than vanilla and acceptable for me, but if you switch between parties far away then you'll have to accept some heavier loading, nothing can be done about that.
Playing on good hardware and fast storage helps of course, but it's not magic either ;)

Thanks for the well thought out break down of your experiences with tweaking the game and its engine. I've had (with maybe 15 hours testing, not much), good experiences with the performance tweaks like engine mesh and vulcan. They seem to provide some more stability for me, as well as a smoother frame rate and fluctuation of frames during loads. I haven't had any more crashes as well which, maybe mostly attributes to my re installation of kenshi.

My setup is good, 3080, i9, 32gigs, m.2, all overclocked, at least good for this game that is. Somehow, maybe last year when playing your list, i was able to get 142 frames at times, and now 90 is my new max. I guess I was wondering if the reduction in the lists size being so sudden from a community creator deleting his content perhaps caused some new stability issues. Perhaps my pc was having a good day or something as well lol. Just seemed unexpected i was getting such lower performance with 30 or so less mods since I last checked in.

What I want to add for anyone reading this who may be testing all of the available methods to optimize, don't skip the basics. When I first played your list and finally got that 142 max, I did something so simple it made me angry that I skipped it. On Scars guide for kenshi optimization, one of the first steps is to make sure you have the lastest version of vc_redist x64 and x86 installed. I skipped this every time I was doing literally everything else, and only afterwards did my frames finally skyrocket. His guide is called "Kenshi Optimization Guide for Performance with max Visual Quality" for anyone who would like to google that and try for themselves.

I will say your modlist is very playable, and I was just looking to see if I could get to that, or around, that old max. Perhaps the mods you added like the united cities merge are very taxing. The hub looks awesome btw, and while around 20-40 fps for me in there, its very playable. Thanks again for all your hard work keeping this project alive and well!

I forgot to add a few other things I did to improve stability, load times, and fps that made a decent difference. For anyone in the future who is like me and exhausts all possible avenues when improving a very heavily modded, or poorly optimized games performance, these should help. Again kinda the basics here, which apparently with kenshis 32 bit engine, are more necessary than most.

Use borderless, not full screen. Notable improvement in fps and stability, and this is unique to kenshi, and is usually the opposite for most games. Kenshi cant use more that 4 gb of ram, due to being a 32 bit engine. This means something like using a triple monitor setup with a high res youtube vid and discord open and running, had a notable effect when shut down for kenshis fps.

For example, near a waystation in shek territory, I decided to test and see if there was a performance increase for turning these apps off. I was getting about 25-30 frames, and when shut off, over 65-80. i was shocked it was so much. Also, I did reinstall the game and freshly apply all of the optimization tricks mentioned in this thread to fix some crashes if anyone is having issues after the mod list was updated.

I'm also forgetting I did move the overhaul mods to my actual game folder and deleted the steam workshop versions which also provided some benefits. So id recommend following all of this collections optional steps to a T, and if your willing to risk going outside those bounds, check out scars guide as well.

Again, I have done everything in scars guide, so this was as a combined result, for some of the examples of what I could squeeze performance wise out of this modpack. Hope this ends up being helpful to at least 1 person out there who is having any frustrations, or wondering if their fps is normal or not. If anyone has any other tips, suggestions, or basics I could try, shoot! let me know. Id love to do some more testing! Cheers

Would there be benefits to moving ALL Steam mods to the kenshi/mods folder?

Originally posted by acymetric:

Would there be benefits to moving ALL Steam mods to the kenshi/mods folder?

There would be some improvements probably, but you would also need to manually update each mod whenever they are updated (because only workshop mods are auto-updated, not local ones).

So could you squeeze out a few more FPS out of it? Probably.
Would it be worth the hassle? Certainly not ;)

Originally posted by MagicHp:

There would be some improvements probably, but you would also need to manually update each mod whenever they are updated (because only workshop mods are auto-updated, not local ones).

So could you squeeze out a few more FPS out of it? Probably.
Would it be worth the hassle? Certainly not ;)

Too late, already wrote a script for it. ;)

For whatever reason Steam won't auto-update my mods for this game anyway, I have to sort my subscribed items in the workshop by "last updated" and unsubscribe/resubscribe as needed to get updates. Following that up by manually copying/renaming won't be so bad (maybe I'll make a version of the script for that, current one does not overwrite to preserve the Steam mods I've already tweaked, and to prevent overwrites in the case of conflicting names - looking at you "Weapons.mod"). On the plus side at least I don't have to worry about an updated mod breaking my game unexpectedly. Plus the script it gives me a list of mod files matched to workshop IDs, helpful with all the confusingly named mod files put there (of course I could do that without copying), and will be useful for sorting out mod conflicts and making custom patches that don't break things in FCS. Thanks for the response!