Hmm is that the reason why the game has such enormous disk usage at every launch? Seems pretty weird choice of design.The game is employing assets rendered in high quality from 3d to 2D for example this asset:a_hors_camel_walkA_x1.smx
Has 960 image frames and a 4MB filesize. It renders the walk animation of a camel. Now imagine other animations happening at the same time and several read write commands.
Certainly the devs have coded the game to cache some of these file streams in the temp folder mostly because of custom mods that need to override the existant assets along with other random optimizations in multiplayer, code logic etc..
Indeed the game can still use some more optimizations given the fact it's not a 3d game so just give it some time. Between you and I the game is yet early beta.
As another side related question, would anyone know why does the game stress the cpu/gpu while on the main menu as much as it does during gameplay? Why would being on the main menu and playing the game be the same stress for the PC?