Flickering (or low FPS) shadows

Farthest Frontier Bug Reporting
1

Hi
After the 1.0 release i’ve noticed a big problem with shadows. Each changing of position is very noticable. As if the shadows were running on 10-20 FPS. They are jumping rather than smoothly moving. I am playing on 60 FPS and to test this out i tried increasing to 90 then 120 (my monitor is 144Hz) still no change.
When it occurs? All the time. To be specific:

  • it doesn’t matter if i move screen or not (still low FPS)
  • it doesn’t matter how big the population is (it looks the same from the start of the game up to like 150 people)
  • I tried different settings: smooth shadows on and off, shadow quality from low to max (to be fair i only notice three levels: off which is no shadows, low which is basically big blob under the tree or building and from avarage to max are looking the same for me)
  • I tried switching other settings with no change

I’m running it on:
Ryzen 7 5700X
RTX 4070 Windforce OC 12G
2x DDR4 Goodram IRDM PRO 16GB 3600MHz
Windows 11

I don’t know if anyone else is having this problem. I would appreciate any feedback. This problem makes the game practically unplayable after a short while. Thank you for your time.

Quick update:
I reinstalled the game and it got even worse, now its 1 FPS. To be super specific things like shadows of moving leaves are smooth, it’s the position changing of whole shadow linked to changing seasons (moving around the clock face) - that kind of shadow is moving in jumps.

2

I reported something similar for v.0.9.7g in May (flickering tree shadows and tree artifacts). Turned out to be caused by a Steam-Proton regression (I’m on Linux), but since you’re on Windows my only tip is to make sure you have the graphics driver up to date. Good luck!

3

Thanks for the reply. All my drivers are up to date. That was the second thing that i checked. In my case it considers all shadows and it is caused by day night cycle so to speak. The day night cycle is linked to changing of the seasons so 24h are basically one year. Instead of moving smoothly shadows are changing their position in jumps. You can imagine how frustrating it is when all shadows are behaving like this.