I am a long-time creator with 700 hours in inZOI, using a mid-range system (RTX 3050, 4GB VRAM). I want to highlight a critical regression in optimization.
1. Lighting Bug (Lumen Implementation):
I want to clarify that in normal, well-lit environments (like daytime or indoor lights on), my character looks perfectly normal and rendered correctly. You can see this in my daylight photo However, the moment I switch to low-light conditions (e.g., turning indoor lights off at night), the Lumen implementation causes severe visual artifacts:
The glowing artifact: My character’s face turns pitch black while the eyes and teeth glow unnaturally
The glowing artifact: My character’s face turns pitch black while the eyes and teeth glow unnaturally (as seen in The ghosting artifact: noticeable black trails behind the character during movement
Question, is this less of a wishlist item and more appropriate in bug report? Did you try there first? I cant believe this would be an intentional feature.
You’re right, it definitely feels like a bug rather than just a wishlist item. I’ve already contacted the development team via email, and they acknowledged the issue. They specifically asked me to share it here in the Wishlist/Feedback section so the community and technical teams can track it officially.
To clarify: Global Illumination and general lighting are working fine. The issue is specifically with how Lumen handles mirror reflections on medium settings—it renders the character as a dark silhouette or causes visual artifacts like glowing eyes. It’s an optimization/scaling issue that appeared after the recent engine update, and I’m hoping to see it addressed in the upcoming patches.
With Lumen Night Lights, when I turn off the lights, my character looks terrifying. There’s no such problem with Global Screen Illumination, but my character doesn’t appear in the mirror. I tried Lumen for this.
On Lumen, I set the reflection quality to ultra, my character is clearly visible in mirrors, but the lighting is poor, especially when walking around the house; it’s pitch black, you can barely see through it.
This honestly sounds more like a lighting/Lumen issue than a problem with your character itself, especially since everything looks normal in daytime or properly lit rooms.
A few things you could try for now:
• Lower Global Illumination and Shadow quality a bit
• Try turning off Screen Space Reflections
• Switch between DLSS and TSR and see if one behaves better
• Lower texture quality slightly to reduce VRAM usage
• Disable Hardware Ray Tracing if it’s enabled
• Delete the shader cache inside:
AppData/Local/inZOI/Saved
The pitch black face with glowing eyes/teeth and the dark ghost trails really sounds like the lighting starts breaking under darker scenes rather than the character being corrupted.
I’ve also seen more people mention weird ghosting and dark-scene issues after recent patches, so hopefully the devs look into it soon.
