Is there any way to change a .ini file somewhere, to reduce the amount of particles the game makes when mining or walking by smoking torches, etc.?
One of my friends has a rather shabby PC, and such particles always makes his PC chug, where it’s relatively alright otherwise.
Being able to thin the grass again would be great., too. Or at least stop the animation.
I haven’t tried any mods in a while but I’m feeling pressured to do it just so i can do things like participate in group hunts. With the graphics system I have there is not any difference I can discern now between having foliage set at 1 or at 8. OR with low/high terrain detail.
The foliage no longer gets smaller with that setting. @james said that before on a post. Don’t remember if it was an official one or under a support topic. I also don’t remember what it does but iirc it was @majorvex that was the one asking about it.
But is there no way to reduce smoke particle effects, and particle effects in general? That’s really the main question my friend has.
Minecraft, for instance, has the option to remove such particle effects entirely, or make them less intensive. But he can’t find a way to do that in this game, and wanted to know if digging around with the graphical .ini file settings would make him able to reduce the effects.
Yeah, I don’t think there’s anything in the current menu settings that really change that. I turned all of the settings down to the minimum or off and I didn’t notice any effect on the particles. Has he tried holding a piece of gleam instead? Or a tool with glow on it? I think there is also a skill for it.
If you manually edit the files, I would imagine you’d have to keep editing/uploading that with each update that is released.
I’m sure he’s done all of this already, but: Has he tried giving the Boundless process high priority in his task manager? I’d also make sure to turn off any anti-virus programs, make sure nothing is updating in the background, make sure there’s enough heat sinks/fans/air/cooling, close browser windows…
yeah, like @majorvex said, try using gleam instead of a torch. that is what I did from day one, could never stand using a torch, the particles were too distracting.
white gleam from Houchus is my choice, but the cool blue from Kada is a lot easier to get and is pretty close to white and works just as good.
The problem I’ve been having with particle effects is that block gathering and weather effects both tend to be a pretty big detriment to my framerate. My computer hates particles in general, and for several games I need to cull particles of any kind to tiny amounts in order to retain consistent framerates.
That’s why I’d like to know if there’s any definitive ways to cull the amount of particles in general.
There is \assets\particles\torch_smoke.json and \assets\particles\torch.json (in your boundless install folder) that include stuff like
\“emittance\”:{\“rate\”:5}
I haven’t tried what modifying that does, but changing rate to 0 (and maybe burstMax just to be sure) might disable torch particles. Other torch files there too 
And block related ones like block_break, block_place etc so it might need a lot of effort to find all the relevant ones, if it even works in the end.
I’d also like some way to reduce or turn this off within a beaconed area at least, I sometimes get annoying mist appearing randomly in my storage basement which I can’t find a reason for existing, doesn’t effect my game performance but Id rather it didn’t happen. Other than that I love the atmospheric particle effects!
@james it would be great to get some options to reduce graphics like particles, grass details, shadow details etc. on PS4 to help mitigate the framerate issues in bigger builds.
Maybe it’s possible to create a blank .png and edit particle effect references to point to the blank .png
Not just PS4, but in general. Some people using older PCs suffer drops in such places, too.
And here I thought PC already had those options o_o
That is definetly a feature I would want soon.
With the lighting and farming update, changes were made that rendered many of these settings ineffective.
I don’t know what sort of layered effects they may impact on a high end graphics card, but on my graphics card I can’t tell the difference between “1” and “8”. With the old system there were obvious changes to grass and foliage between high and low.
I don’t think any setting ever affected rain, fog, or the particle effects.
Ah ok, I must admit I never saw the PC version.
Good luck finding some .ini files or other stuff to tweak what you are looking for^^