How many colonists can the game handle?

[Headshotkill]

As the title says, what is the highest number of colonist's you've ever had that didn't lag your game too much?

[christhekiller]

I seem to stop getting colonists are 10

[Architect]

I know in alpha 3 anymore than 80 began to lag a. However, there was also a bug with idle colonists causing heavy CPU usage, which may have contributed to why 80 was the max. I don't think that would have changed for alpha 4, but honestly I don't know, it could have.

[UrbanBourbon]

The answer (to the thread title) depends on following things:
Map size: Smaller maps put less strain on your PC. That means you could have more colonists and everything would run smoothly. You can totally annihilate performance right from the start if you pick a huge map.
PC specs: A more powerful PC would obviously perform better, and would allow more colonists. I believe CPU and possibly higher clock frequency RAM would grant better performance.

On top of those, you can also edit the storyteller AIs to allow more colonists. Randy Random allows 50 or 80 colonists, was it? Back in alpha 3 I had a Randy game and had 50 colonists. Somewhere between 40 and 50 the game stopped being 100% fluid, and there was constant mild stutter. I had limited my frame rate to 58, months ago, with Nvidia Inspector, so that might be a factor as well. Map size was medium, possibly 250x250 tiles. CPU: i5-2500k (not overclocked) and GPU: GTX 460. Now in alpha 4, the pathfinding is radically optimized, and I've yet to test its limits.

And now some old man rantings: Back in Dwarf Fortress I stumbled upon this curious claim that tight RAM timings would make DF run better. There was specifically one forum post that listed one user's results as he experimented with memory timings and it sure looked like memory timings made a world of difference to DF's frame rate. I'm wondering if eventually same would apply to RimWorld, as map sizes get bigger and bigger, with more and more objects to handle. It's bit tricky to find some low latency RAM these days... but not impossible!