Fast Load

Features

Shorter loading screens, without changing what the game loads.

About half of a vanilla area load is spent waiting: the level loader pauses for fixed delays

between its steps (around 6 seconds per load), then frees memory a second time right after

having done it in the empty transition scene. Fast Load removes those waits and lets Unity

work faster while the loading screen is up. With SideLoader installed, it also takes texture

decoding and asset bundle reading off SideLoader's start-up path.

Nothing to configure. Install it and loads are shorter.

Measured gains

Time until the "press a key" prompt, Definitive Edition, i5-9600K / RTX 3060 / SATA SSD, with a

SideLoader-based mod list (average of two runs each):

| Trip | Vanilla | Fast Load |

|---|---|---|

| Main menu -> Chersonese | 16.5 s | 9.1 s |

| Cierzo -> Chersonese dungeon | 11.8 s | 3.5 s |

| Chersonese dungeon -> Cierzo | 13.0 s | 6.1 s |

| Cierzo -> Chersonese | 14.6 s | 8.6 s |

| Chersonese -> Chersonese dungeon | 11.8 s | 4.1 s |

| Chersonese dungeon -> Chersonese | 14.4 s | 8.6 s |

| Chersonese -> Cierzo | 13.4 s | 6.5 s |

| Game start -> main menu (SideLoader mod list) | 24.7 s | 18.8 s |

What it changes

Level loads

• The loader's fixed WaitForSeconds delays become a single frame.
• Right after the players are placed at their spawn point, the game waits instead until there is

ground under them, never longer than vanilla's 2.5 s. Some areas (Berg) build their ground a

moment after the player is placed: resuming earlier would drop the player through it, and the

fall would kill them on the next landing.

• After a defeat, the load waits until the defeat scenario has finished setting up in the new area

(it does so one second into the load, which a fast load can outrun), so the player respawns alive.

• While the loading screen is up, Unity may spend up to 50 ms per frame integrating loaded assets

(vanilla: about 4 ms).

• The second memory cleanup (UnloadUnusedAssets + garbage collection) is skipped when the

transition scene already ran one in the same load. Measured: same memory use 5 s after loading.

Game start, when SideLoader is installed

• The PNG textures of SideLoader packs are decoded on worker threads. The result is cached in

BepInEx\cache\FastLoad.textures, so later starts skip both the decode and the compression.

The textures are byte-for-byte those SideLoader itself produces.

• The asset bundles of SideLoader packs are opened asynchronously as soon as every mod is loaded.

Whenever a precondition does not hold - an unknown game version, an unusual image format, a

changed mod list - Fast Load leaves that step to the game or to SideLoader.

Settings

Via Outward Configuration Manager (F5),

or BepInEx\config\tchernobill.fastload.cfg. All are on by default, except:

Skip low-memory transition scene (off). Vanilla loads an empty scene between two areas so both

are never in memory together. Skipping it saves up to 2 more seconds per load, but raises the

memory peak during loads by 350-500 MB. Leave it off on PCs with 8 GB of RAM or less.

Fixed wait scale (0) brings back a fraction of the vanilla delays: 1 is vanilla.

Verify decoded textures (off) is a diagnostic: it decodes each SideLoader texture the vanilla

way too and logs whether both are identical.

Compatibility

• Tested in solo. Co-op has not been tested; the co-op specific waits are left untouched.
• SideLoader is optional. Without it, only the level load changes apply.
• Saves are not touched.