Originally posted by Hobo Misanthropus:

Physics, wind, day night, growth cycle, AI, Factionstate, light and sound propegation. All these things are running constantly in loaded zones, and have to also be tracked in memory constantly so that when the player enters a new zones they update correctly.

What Physics? Once drops have settled and as long as buildings aren't meddled with I don't see what needs to be calculated. Growth cycles should be cheap to compute if implemented properly - Valheim isn't Factorio. Wind and lighting effects are hopefully handled by the GPU and shouldn't contribute to the CPU-bottleneck you've invoked. The AI in this game strikes me as very simplistic and hardly integrates player made structures in its pathing. Besides there tend to be less NPCs around bases unless you run a farm at the same spot.