One Year Achievement/Reduce CPU load

[triac]

2 things.

1. Is there any way to tell the progress of the One Year achievement? Garry's Mod (which coincidentally happens to have almost the exact same achievements) has at least a progress bar.

2. Actually One Year related too. Obviously no person on this planet is ever going to play this game for 8760 hours. Just no way. So the only possibility to get the achievement is to load the game and let it run in the background.
Too bad this game eats up about 70% all the time. Even in an empty sandbox with disabled backgrounds and everything. Forcing it to only use the second core doesn't make it much better. Still about 50% total CPU load. Playing other games is quite difficult that way.

At least Garry's Mod can be put into a text mode (so it's only a cmd window) and always uses less  than 2%... I barely passed 6 months by now by the way.

So is there any way to further reduce the CPU load?


I love totally reasonable achievements...

[atomic7732]

I don't think the point of the game is to grind to get achievements. It's to mess with the universe and gravitation.

[triac]

I never said that I wasn't going to do this. But I don't intend to "mess with the universe and gravitation" for 8760 hours. Thats 5 hours every day for almost 5 years. I'm no World of Warcraft, StarCraft or Counter-Strike lunatic and achievements should be one thing above all: Actually achievable.
But without grinding it's just not possible without any mental damage.

[Joshimitsu91]

I never said that I wasn't going to do this. But I don't intend to "mess with the universe and gravitation" for 8760 hours. Thats 5 hours every day for almost 5 years. I'm no World of Warcraft, StarCraft or Counter-Strike lunatic and achievements should be one thing above all: Actually achievable.
But without grinding it's just not possible without any mental damage.

They are achievable, by someone who plays the game for a year...

Since there is no benefit of having the achievement, why does it bother you so much? If you "achieved" it by running the game in the background, that isn't really something you can be proud of, so whats the point?

[triac]

They are achievable, by someone who plays the game for a year...

So an achievement like "Play for 200 years" would be totally fine too? It is achievable after all. There's just no human capable of doing it.
 
It's just not realistic. You'll probably won't even find someone who achieves "One Month" with just playing.

Since there is no benefit of having the achievement, why does it bother you so much?

Some people just like to complete achievements. Preferably all achievements a game has to offer.
But games like this just ruin the fun part with completely unreasonable achievements.
Achievements are supposed to be fun and/or challenging but this one is neither.

Other examples apart from Garry's Mod are:

Darksiders
"Ride for 100 miles" while playing through the game you didn't even ride 20 so you ended up riding aimlessly for hours.

Mafia 2
"Drive a total of 1,000 miles in vehicles in "Jimmy's Vendetta."
You barely drove 120 in the entire campaign so you had to drive for about 10 hours on the highway.

If you "achieved" it by running the game in the background, that isn't really something you can be proud of, so whats the point?

It's the only way to do it so I guess it's something to be proud of. The first one to achieve the Garry's Mod "1 year" achievement got basically celebrated.

We are completely drifting away from my question by the way.

[triac]

I assume that both is not possible since the admin has basically posted in every other thread above this one.

Never mind then. I found a program to put Universe Sandbox in chains. And instead of a counter I just use this timer thing set to real time, which will probably become pretty inaccurate after several months.

[bterrill]

I think I have 250-300 hours on this game, and yes I let it run while I sleep or am not on the pc. Any actually good system is going to take a longggggggggg time for progress to be made. I am sure I'll hit the one month one , though it might take till this time next year to do it.

But if you're one of the people who get bored after 20 minutes and don't mess with this much then you probably won't hit it.

As for the 1 year one, definitly unrealistic as in 24hr*365 but I never care about achievements. If I get them I get them , if I don't , oh well. 

I've never much noticed the CPU Load, but I do notice the timestep going down low but I can speed that up by turning off trails and labels (helps a whole lot) , and not using rings/deleting dust when too much piles up. Kind of sucks though, but that's more of my pc limitations.

[Darvince]

I've noticed that on my computer at least, Universe Sandbox doesn't slow it down that much until there's 50+ objects.

[Dan Dixon]

When Universe Sandbox is not the focused application it automatically reduces its priority, but will still take the extra CPU cycles if they are available.

[Joshimitsu91]

It is achievable after all. There's just no human capable of doing it.

So what you're saying is 200 years is achievable but not by a human? So its not achievable...

[BWags267]

You can see progress to the RunTime and RunCount achievements by looking at the Sandbox Log.txt in
C:\Users\<Your Username>\Documents\Universe Sandbox\Logs    (for a Windows 7 machine)

The actual save data is in a file called Steam.Stats.data here:
C:\Users\<Your Username>\AppData\Local\Universe Sandbox    (for a Windows 7 machine)

You could probably pass your save file around so other people could get the same achievements.

If you have a Windows 7 machine, you will notice that the time is counted even if the computer goes to sleep.  I got to a month by keeping a virtual machine running this game asleep.  But then I realized that the clock of the VM is based on the host machine.  So I set my host machine's clock ahead by a year, and woke up the virtual machine, and got the One Year achievement.  Easy.

[Dan Dixon]

You could probably pass your save file around so other people could get the same achievements.

There is some code to prevent this, but probably not fool proof. Anyway... all very interesting ways of getting around these ridiculous achievements.

[clockworks]

OP, are your jimmies rustled?
it's a fun achievement

[11JRidding]

I'm thinking Cheat Engine can help with this...