I started upgrading several areas of performance with beta v 0.3.0c though was honestly trying to do the bare minimum amount of changes mostly for time constraint reasons. All in all that caused more harm than good and the current beta build is quite unstable.
Since then I have gone forward with more wide-reaching changes changing some of the fundamentals of how game data is managed in runtime. This will lead to increased performance and do away with a number of recurring problems. I have more or less completed the work, but it needs further testing and a few more tweaks and then it should be ready for tomorrow.
Still, this patch will not reduce terrain size, which would force a wipe of all world saves. Currently each terrain is 1 kilometer squared and it's pretty taxing to turn them on and off causing the lagg spikes that occur when running around. The new system will alleviate a lot of that lagg, but not all of it. It would require another one or two arrays of data to be written to disk, but reducing the terrain size to something more like 256 meters squared could end up providing a much smoother gameplay experience. It might be possible to upgrade the world "upgrade" feature to handle that shift and not require a complete wipe as well.
I just don't like leaving the news empty for more than a couple of days at worst and wanted to provide an update on what's going on behind the scenes! Thank you to everyone that has joined us for Early Access, and I hope I haven't caused to many beta tester headaches with the current beta build!