How to Fix Colonist Needs Decaying Faster at Higher Simulation Speed

If colonists starve twice as fast at 2x speed, your decay is tied to render frames, not simulated time. Decouple the simulation from the frame rate so a game-day always costs the same amount of need regardless of how fast the player runs it. Here is how to make decay speed-independent.

How to fix it

1. Define a fixed sim tick

Advance simulation in fixed steps of game-time, e.g. one tick equals 10 in-game minutes. Speed controls how many ticks you process per real second, never the size of a tick, so each tick always applies the same decay.

2. Decay per tick, not per frame

Subtract need amounts inside the fixed tick using need -= decayPerGameMinute * minutesPerTick. Rendering at 30 or 144 fps no longer changes how much hunger a day costs.

3. Accumulate leftover time

Carry a time accumulator and run as many fixed ticks as the elapsed real time and current speed multiplier allow, processing decay once per tick so totals stay identical across speeds.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.