Hi guys!

I have repeatedly noticed something quite strange: I am smelting some bar (let's say iron) and I don't have enough mine production to sustain it, so there is a delay between each smelt and my iron ore never goes up as it is immediately used, which is completely normal.

Then I go off the game for half an hour and when I come back, i have several thousands ore in reserve, that are then depleted in a short time while I am on the app.

This seems to indicate that smelting is slower when you are not on the app (or that mines produce more, but that would be even weirder)

Did anyone else experience this?

Edited 4/7/2021 00:28:56

You're likely just running out of resources for your smelters. That's what happens when you're trying to produce more than what you can supply for.

Edited 4/6/2021 23:50:47

Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear enough ^^
I should be running out of resources, and I am running out while I am on the app (like I need 600 but i only get to 400 ore by the time the smelt is done, so it waits a few seconds then start a new smelt)

but then i go out of the app, and half an hour later i have 3000 ore, which should not be possible if smelting continued at the same speed (and indeed, while I am on the app again, it quickly goes back to 0)

Edited 4/6/2021 23:55:50

Then you are likely building supply while waiting for the smelters to finish, which can happen if they started at the same time and you are building supply at such a rate for the net change to zero.

You could have 5 smelters using 3000 total of some ore, using your number, and the smelting for 1 of those bars is 5 minutes. With this, this means that the smelters are using about 10 ore/sec for the chosen bar. This would mean to break even with production, you would need your mines to produce 10 of the same ore/sec. Since you said you 3000 of a certain ore that got used for a recipe needing only 600, this is likely what happened.

Ok let's put in the actual numbers :)

I have only 1 smelter smelting iron ore

I smelt one bar in 9 seconds and it takes 633 ore so I need 70,33 iron/sec to supply continuous smelting

I have 52 iron ore/sec production.

I have no iron ore stock, it is depleted, so it should never raise above 633 irone ore (and while I am on the game, i don't go over, i am constlantly "waiting for resources").

Yet when i go away from the game and come back later i have more than 633 iron ore, which shoud not be possible

Sync error then?

I suggest running a timer for both and see what the results are.

When you are away from idle, it simulates the passes of time using an algorithm. It's usually pretty good at simulating what would have happened if the app was open, but in some circumstances it won't be 100% accurate.

I noticed it.
At 9 seconds per iron bar smelting time, you don't know if the actual time is 8.5s or 9.49s, and the processing rate for ore can vary significantly. That's why I did the following experiment:
Set a crafter to work on a recipe, say 3 minutes 1 second per item. No items in storage, no duplicate crafting advancements or artifacts. Watch the progress and the clock. I noticed something like 3 minutes 25 seconds for crafting an item, significantly longer than 3m01s advertised.
Wrote down the starting time and let the game run for 1+ hours. Returned, noted down the time passed and the number of items crafted. The crafting time was close to the 3m1s advertised. Assumed the game runs slower on my (older) phone, and needs resyncing for showing the actual status.
Sync issues are hard to investigate without seeing both ends (app and server), and without knowing which info is passed each way, and the timing of the syncs; so I assumed all discrepancies have out-of-sync causes, and didn't investigate further.

This is a very cool bug,

I hadn't even considered this. I just took all the timings at face value. Interesting.