[h1]A Masterpiece Suffocated by Its Own Engine[/h1]
Stormworks is exactly the game I wanted to play. The premise is unmatched: building highly complex, logic-driven vehicles and taking them out on rescue and logistics missions. There is nothing else like it on the market.
Unfortunately, you can only enjoy that dream in a vacuum. The performance completely falls apart during normal gameplay, plaguing you with "Low TPS" (Ticks Per Second) that reduces the game to a painful, slow-motion slideshow. The worst part is that it doesn’t even require multiplayer or massive, oversized creations to break the game. Even in single-player, with the map completely cleaned up and only ONE moderately sized, reasonable vehicle active, the TPS drops. Your high-end PC hardware—even a desktop running an i9 processor—sits practically idle while the game chokes.
To make matters worse, trying to get help is an exercise in futility. If you go to the Geometa Issue Tracker to report these performance issues, the developers routinely brush them aside. They constantly claim they "cannot reproduce" the lag or TPS drops, choosing to blame individual player hardware, antivirus software, or file configurations rather than admitting their game is broken. It feels incredibly dismissive to a community trying to help save the game.
This isn't just a minor optimization bug; it is an unfixable flaw in the game's core architecture. The developers built Stormworks on a strictly single-threaded physics engine. Because physics and custom Lua logic are forced to calculate sequentially on a single CPU core, it hits a hard performance ceiling immediately. Other vehicle builders like Trailmakers or Space Engineers have proven that you can achieve smooth performance with clever engine design and multithreading, but Stormworks is permanently trapped by its own foundation.
Instead of rebuilding or fundamentally fixing this foundation, Geometa chose to keep selling heavy expansion DLCs that put more weight on a breaking shelf. Now, they have moved their resources onto a new game, "Anymaker," to build a better engine from scratch. While I hope they learned their lesson about engine limitations, it is deeply frustrating to watch the developers abandon the unique vehicle-logistics game we actually paid for in favor of a "DayZ-style" zombie survival game.
Unless you only intend to build tiny, basic vehicles, look elsewhere. The engine simply cannot handle the game's own scope, no matter how powerful your PC is, and the developers refuse to even acknowledge the problem.
