Originally posted by Weaver:

Originally posted by Hotboxx:

just under 15,500....

Yeah, that's really pushing it with your specs, especially with 50+ animals and NPCs in addition. If you have a lot of torches/fires they become really demanding as well as they create constantly changing light and smoke particle effects.
The reality is all building games run into this at a certain point as each and every item loading into active cells has to be tracked dynamically all at once. In your case it's trying to do so with over 15k separate objects.
At some point there will be better optimization but that usually comes closer to launch, not 2+ years out because everytime major components are added or systems are done, a ton of previous optimization is wiped out. Even at best there will still be limits regardless of optimization and hardware.
I have a rtx 3080 and I7-10700kf so I've pushed up to 20k active Instances so far (plus a HD texture mod) without issue but I'll still hit a point where it'll impact performance.
If your world is older than when they did the terrain optimization you can try running the command to run it in your base and it may bring down the instances significantly and your fps up. (enable console via "-console" as a launch argument. Once in game use the console command "opt terrain" to optimize local terrain)
You can also try reducing dynamic light/smoke sources and npcs and/or running a cleanup command. Large fields of crops can have a significant impact as well.
Either way you'll not want to build further close by, but far enough away that the bases aren't loaded at the same time, and keep track of active instances to stay under whatever effects your frame rate significantly.

Before Patch
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2519687170

After Patch
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2537544218

Something is definitely wrong with this patch, maybe it's not happening to you but i should not have that big of a frame drop in the same spot.