Spiral Knights

Spiral Knights

287 ratings
Improve In-Game Performance!
By ZAMN
With this guide, you should be able to increase your performance quite significantly in SK. We’ll do so by making it use 64-bit Java instead of 32-bit as well as adding some parameters to use more RAM and CPU power.
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Preparation
First off, you need to find out if you can actually run 64-bit applications as well as check how much RAM you have. While most PCs produced in the last ten years can run 64-bit, you might have installed a 32-bit operating system, which will prevent you from running 64-bit applications without reinstalling the operating system.

Open the start menu, right click “Computer” and press “Properties”. Here, you will find some information about your PC, including RAM and if your operating system installation is 32-bit or 64-bit. Take note of your RAM, as we’ll need to know how much you have later on.



If you are running a 32-bit system, you will not be able to run Spiral Knights on 64-bit Java and this guide is not for you.
Installing 64-bit Java
IMPORTANT! You will need to download from here! NOT from Java.com, RAR password: spiral
Windows[drive.google.com]
Linux[drive.google.com]
MacOS[drive.google.com]

Once it’s downloaded, you need to open your Spiral Knights installation folder. If you’re playing through Steam, this should be C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Spiral Knights. If you’re playing the standalone version of the game, it should be C:\Program Files\Spiral Knights. You can open the folder through Steam by right clicking Spiral Knights in your library, opening Properties, going to the Local Files tab and clicking Browse local files…



In that directory, you’ll find a folder called java_vm. Rename it to java_vm_backup, in case we screw something up.



For Windows users: Go to Downloads folder and extract files from .rar archive we just downloaded (Java 8u251.rar). Now copy java_vm and extra.txt



Go back to SK installation directory and paste it in there. If you did everything correctly, Spiral Knights should be running on 64-bit Java!



If the game no longer boots, you probably didn’t follow the instructions properly, and you'll have to rename java_vm_backup folder back to java_vm in order to undo the recent changes.
Verifying that it worked
Checking if the 64-bit Java installation is quite easy. Just start Spiral Knights and open the Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc. Open the processes tab and sort by memory usage. You should find a java.exe process that’s using a decent amount of RAM. If it says java.exe *32, Spiral Knights is still running on 32-bit. If it just says java.exe, you’ve succeeded!

extra.txt - more RAM and CPU usage
Next step is to make Spiral Knights make more use of your system. Go to your Spiral Knights installation folder and create a text file called extra.txt. Note that you’ll only have to name it extra if your system has extensions hidden. You can quickly see this by looking at digest.txt right above it. If it says digest.txt, create extra.txt. If it’s just digest, create just extra.

Open up the extra.txt and paste this:

-XX:+DisableExplicitGC -Xms512M -Xmx4096M -XX:+UseParallelGC -XX:+UseParallelOldGC

Depending on how much free RAM your system has
You can replace Xms and Xmx values
Here are some examples below:

16 GB RAM
-Xms512M -Xmx8192M

8 GB RAM
-Xms512M -Xmx4096M

4 GB RAM
-Xms512M -Xmx2048M

2 GB RAM
-Xms512M -Xmx1024M

An example of my extra.txt file:

-XX:+DisableExplicitGC -Xms512M -Xmx3072M -XX:+UseParallelGC -XX:+UseParallelOldGC

If you have less than 2GB RAM: Both Xms and Xmx should be 512M

The last two lines tells Spiral Knights to use several CPU cores for garbage collection.

Closing words
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to know more, you can take a look at this old thread.[forums.spiralknights.com]

Also bear in mind that if you’re playing on Steam and use its Verify integrity of game cache function, it will restore back to 32-bit Java, in which case you’ll need to do this over again.
Knight Launcher
If you can't make this work, download KnightLauncher[github.com] and extract .jar file into your game directory. You might want to configure some settings from KnightLauncher though!
Like setting your desired memory, by default it'll be set to 512MB



77 Comments
Aegalite 26 Jun @ 5:30pm 
10/10 will knight again
mr man 25 May @ 12:45pm 
New update seems to have reset the fix for me, plonked me back onto 32 bit. Works fine for me after doing the fix again.
ZAMN  [author] 19 May @ 3:23am 
I highly recommend KnightLauncher to anyone that is confused or lazy. KL is a great little tool that automatically improves game performance!
Alice 17 May @ 8:39am 
Thanks for this. I recently came back to SK after 11 years(!!!). This helped a lot. Ironically, I'm still using the same POS computer I used back then, with lots of upgrades of course. But still.
Kerosene Chugger 25 Apr @ 9:17pm 
You. You are the very reason I am able to play this game again after five years of being unable to boot it. Thank you. Thank you SO MUCH! I cannot begin to express my gratitude for what you have done for me and many others who had the similar problems. I can finally play Crimson Hammer now! Again, thank you! :winter2019joyfultearsdog:
ZAMN  [author] 24 Feb @ 10:45am 
i know what you mean, these sloppy games and companies don't deserve our attention.
Trippy 24 Feb @ 6:38am 
I really mean it in a nonhatefull way but im fed up with this What is with Apex Legends for excample the same performance issues what is with Bloodhunt the masc. Performace issues ,was is with DayZ performance issues PoE performance Issues at old and new games or u need a high end pc for old games ?! But anyway thx the guide ...
ZAMN  [author] 24 Feb @ 6:18am 
this game is like 20 years old and its been abandoned for years, so for forgotten games like these community makes efforts.
Trippy 24 Feb @ 12:37am 
WTF what is going on with the gaming industry almost every game has some kind of flaw and you have to do something like this to make it run smoothly, today as it did back then. If I could do something like this really easily then I would be an IT expert and not spend my time on such badly programmed games. It's just annoying to play games on the computer. A friend bought a $3k PC but the games still lag and stutter!!! Java bit versions here and there, compatibility errors, administrator settings, rewriting confiks, console imports often broke, WTF is really getting worse and worse and slowly it's no longer interesting or fun or entertaining, just tiring and stressful. Thank you very much for your work but I don't get it at all, to be honest it's way too much fuss for me.
ZAMN  [author] 6 Feb @ 3:55am 
of course