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Performance

Metaplanets Creator is built with performance in mind: planets generate at runtime with dynamic LODs, so they run smoothly on low-end and consumer hardware — without visible pop-in or frame drops.

Runtime generation

Planets are generated at runtime rather than baked into maps. This means:

  • Scenes stay small in the editor.
  • The same asset works across quality tiers.
  • LOD switching is continuous and tuned to avoid visible transitions.

LOD

Each quarter LOD has a min level and a max level. Raising max level beyond 12 allows for finer geometric detail, at the cost of traversal time and spawn time.

The Detail Distance Scale and Detail Distance Power settings shape the LOD detail curve from the camera. A lower power means higher coverage of high-LOD tiles around the planet — trading speed for quality.

Baked noise

Toggle the Metaplanets.BakedNoise flag in the console. When noise is baked, a repeating texture is applied to the planet — this trades compute time for memory.

Normal map / biome map size

In the Material details panel of the Metaplanet Actor, the normal map size defaults to 64 but can be set to 128 or higher for better-quality visuals from afar. Setting this also affects the biome map size.

Target hardware

Developed from the start on a MacBook M4 Pro and tested on a MacBook M3 Pro, and it works on Windows too.

It's fast and stable on Mac. On Windows, performance can vary depending on the hardware — CPU and memory bandwidth matter, and the GPU matters for any planets that use GPU compute nodes.

Tips

  • Keep graph complexity where the player looks.
  • Erosion Landforms (V2) is the most expensive terrain node. Mask it so it only runs where it matters, and keep its Octaves no higher than you can see.
  • Use the 3D Preview's timing in the Terrain Graph editor to compare graph changes.

Foliage

Foliage usually costs more than terrain in a dense scene. In order of impact:

  1. Reach (Max Distance per species). Grass at 120 m, shrubs at 400 m, trees at 2–3 km is a good start. Grass count grows with the square of its reach.
  2. Density. Halving a ground-cover species' density halves its cost; halving tree density is often invisible from the air.
  3. Impostors for trees (the default for the temperate kit). See Nanite.
  4. Shadows: metaplanets.Spawner.ShadowsStatic 1 caches every species' shadows; metaplanets.Spawner.ScatterShadowDistanceMeters limits grass shadows to near the camera.
  5. Distance-field lighting from trees costs about 15–20% on dense jungle: metaplanets.SpawnerDistanceFieldLighting 0 turns it off.
  6. Wind: metaplanets.Spawner.WindMaxMeters stops animation beyond a distance (not for species with impostors).

metaplanets.Spawner.ReachScale and GrassReachScale scale every species' reach at once, which makes them good quality settings for a graphics menu. See Foliage & Biomes for every variable.