Board Thread:Bug Reports/@comment-25841881-20160730200924/@comment-33763020-20180121173237

I understand this is a 1,5 year old thread, but as it's still relevant, here's my experience of the past few days and hopefully useful information, as some of the assumptions above have proved not to be founded in my case:

1. I only played single-player so far and not on a server, so the assumption of only occurring on server is not the case.

2. It is not just duplication, but can be a manyfold multiplication: in my case 4 horses jumped up to over 50 in one go.

3. This does not only happen with NPC's: I had not only hired units (Rangers), hobbit farmhands and (saddled+non-saddled) horses/deer multiply, but an Elven banner as well that hung above the door multiplied by about a dozen (forgot to count I'm afraid).

4. The farmhand multiplication resulted in multiplication of their inventory as well, in my case seeds/wheat, though I am not sure in terms of the actual counts, as the farmhands were working on and I did not immediately check their inventory after they multiplied.

5. In my case it happens mostly at one place, which is close to my original spawnpoint, irrespective of last point of sleeping. It always happened after fast-travel or game loading, though I cannot be sure whether it would happen when I return on foot or horseback, as I almost never return to this spawnpoint that way. I recall it once happened with hired Rangers at an other custom waypoint as well however.

6. It never happened to me when moving NPC's with me, whether hired troops, farmhands or animals on a leash.

7. When the multiplication occurs and I fast travel or restart the game, sometimes it gets set back to the original situation, in other words the copies get deleted and suddenly all is quiet.

8. The last occasion was one where I coincidentally had a farmhand in sight when the system started up and the multiplication happened in front of my eyes: as the chunks loaded in, I saw the farmhand appear, then reappear multiply times at the same spot (like travelling traders do when they do not "jump out" from the spawnpoint and you see 3-5 of them morphed in one spot until they "separate"), until finally they separated and I had maybe 50 of them. With a similar amount in my other crops my system pretty much froze up and I had to reboot, then fast travel to avoid a crash and when returning, all was back to normal with the copies disappearing.

I have the assumption that my slow laptop causes a lag, that enables these multiplications that are related to chunk-loading lag, as it loads an identical copy until it "catches up" with itself, similar to when a block cannot be placed due to lag, but your inventory shows one block less as if it has actually been placed. I can imagine that slow servers or ones where separate slow computers are connected, can cause such issues as well. I'm just speculating though, I guess if computer specs where brought in, it would make more sense to compare.