Many have requested the feature of being able to change properties of the simulation pertaining to size.

So far, this has been denied for two main reasons. Firstly and most importantly, the general opinion is that this change would negatively affect performance even in the case of a simulation that is the same size as the vanilla one. Secondly and nearly as importantly, it is a large undertaking to refactor the codebase to allow for this feature, and an even larger one to verify that it works correctly afterwards.

So what if one were to take the low-quality service approach?

The refactoring effort argument is valid but not impervious to it; indeed, I have successfully refactored the codebase to support loading the simulation size from the game's configuration file once at startup. This is a low-quality solution; the ideal solution would allow changing the simulation size at runtime. I have not verified and do not plan on verifying extensively how well this works, which completely ignores the verification effort argument, but that is fine as this is just a mod, not the base game. This is once again a low-quality solution.

This leaves the performance argument, which is what this mod is meant to prove or disprove. In other words, I would like to gather real-world data and experience on what a simulation with dynamic size parameters is like and how well it runs. It might also amuse some of you, as an added bonus. Have fun.

Known issues:

• Newtonian gravity is broken; this is not for any good technological reason, I just made a mistake somewhere
• configuring a small enough simulation size makes it impossible to open settings; again, no good technological reason, I just haven't gotten around to fixing this

Download links below. Builds naturally are hosted by @jacob1 and updated from starcatcher.

• x86_64-linux-gnu
• aarch64-darwin-macos
• x86-windows-msvc
• x86_64-darwin-macos
• x86_64-windows-msvc

This mod shares the data folder with the base game and tries its best to minimize interference with it. That said, oversize saves created with this mod will naturally be impossible to open with the base game, which will report them as broken. It will however happily open undersize saves.

Simulation size can be changed in Simulation settings. Changes take effect on restart. Invalid simulation size parameters are rejected ahead of time so they do not even make it into the configuration. If invalid parameters do make it into the configuration, they are normalized at startup.

Note that simulations larger than 255 by 255 cells cannot be saved because the save format does not support such dimensions. Simulation settings warns you about this ahead of time.

Important note: If your antivirus solution has decided that this mod is a threat, add the mod to its list of exceptions. See further information here. I refuse to deal with this problem in this thread; please refrain from leaving comments about it.

The mod's source is available on the resizable-sim branch of my fork of TPT.