Memory/Voxels are out of control

So I was trying to figure out why the game keep eating 13-15 gb of ram in this one spot where I am. Was is a memory leak, or the game keeping track of everything and I mean everything. My biggest issue was I did some digging and that really send the ram to the moon. I have 32gb of Virtual memory and 32gb of Physical memory.

I also did the Force GC button in the Debug->Memory, but it only cleared maybe 1gb of collection for the spot I am at.

Well one I started to look at the debug menu and look at memory. The data shows me it becomes hard to justify digging for resources/making space, around where you are building till this gets fixed.

You will fill up your ram and Vram, and leave your base, a huge memory sink, unless there is something that will put the digging into Stored memory after getting a certain distance away and coming back. For that IDK.

I made a copy of the memory stats and learned this from posting it into an AI. Now I have no idea if the AI can report on such a new engine accurately, but it can do much better than I can. _▲_

Report:

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Technical Diagnostic Report: Engine Memory Scaling Analysis

• Game Client: Space Engineers 2 (VRAGE3 Engine Tech Preview)
• Active Gameplay State: Local Survival Mode (Heavy Voxel Manipulation & Exploration)
• Report Focus: Analysis of Grid Permission Restrictions and Memory Leak Dynamics

Executive Summary

The engine instability you experienced was a multi-tiered bottleneck where 12GB to 13GB of physical RAM was heavily saturated, while the remaining 10.2GB of active data was pushed into the Windows Pagefile (Virtual Memory) (p. 1). This behavior is triggered directly by a structural flaw in the VRAGE3 engine's dynamic voxel cache (p. 11).

Instead of writing terrain changes to disk and dumping the live assets, the engine retains thousands of independent coordinates in temporary system memory, threatening a complete game crash (pp. 11-12).

Comprehensive Metric Breakdown

The diagnostic stats document a total process memory footprint of 22.70 GiB (p. 1). Here is exactly how that weight is distributed between your physical hardware and your system storage drive:

1. Voxel & Terrain Cache

• Physical Footprint: Voxels accounts for 1.54 GiB of raw geometry data (p. 1).
• Active Tracking Load: The engine is actively calculating 366,962 live terrain grid squares (CellData) and 29,244 custom modifications (VoxelCell) simultaneously (pp. 12-13).
• The Cause: Every single piece of dirt, stone, or ore mined out near the base forces the engine to run a real-time positional calculation loop (pp. 11-12). It fails to flush this cache while the session remains active (p. 11).

2. Render Pipeline (Render12)

• Physical Footprint: 9.25 GiB (p. 1).
• The Cause: Because the local terrain layout has been intensely altered by digging, the rendering system is forced to dedicate nearly 10GB of memory exclusively to drawing the complex shadows, broken voxel edges, and grass geometry surrounding the immediate area (p. 1).

3. Native Allocators & Garbage Collection

• Garbage Collection (GC) Pool: 4.11 GiB (p. 1).
• Native Heap Allocators: 2.53 GiB (p. 1).
• The Cause: This reflects basic system code processing. Manual commands like "Force GC Collect" are only capable of clearing minor, loose string fragments out of this 4.11 GiB bucket—it is physically incapable of removing the massive 9.25 GiB render architecture or the 1.54 GiB voxel structures (p. 1).

Hardware Asset Allocation Mapping

[ Total Engine Impact: 22.70 GiB ] ├── Physical RAM Pool (12 GB - 13 GB Active Working Set) │ └── Active player movements, local block rendering, UI updates └── Windows Pagefile (10.20 GiB Virtual Disk Swap) └── Stale voxel arrays, historical mining data, unrendered scene components 

Because your physical system memory reached its active handling threshold, Windows stepped in to prevent a hard crash by offloading the inactive data onto your hard drive. While this saved the game from closing instantly, it causes massive frame drops and engine stuttering as the game tries to read data across two completely different hardware speeds.

🛠️ Mitigations & Permanent Core Action Plan

To stabilize this environment permanently while maintaining a strict Survival-only ruleset, use this dual-layered approach:

Part A: Cleansing the Voxel Memory Leak

1. Perform a manual Save Game via the Escape menu to write the finished Cell Data arrays directly to your storage drive.
2. Complete a Full Restart to Desktop.
3. Upon reloading, the engine will read the dug-out terrain straight from your disk as flat, unmutated data. This slashes the total memory impact, instantly recovering your physical RAM baseline.

Have a great day!

Sincerely: